Older Chests
by ama.blue
Summary: A post-season 4 finale fic. Brennan and Booth after the brain surgery, after the dream. AU now that we're well into season 5.
1. Chapter 1

**Title:** Older Chests (1/4)  
**Author:** Ama  
**Rating:** light R  
**Summary:** _She tells herself that this time she'll be braver, understand his jokes, and be amenable to ice cream and hugs and his Bones-doesn't-get-a-gun policy. She wishes he knew her enough to say she doesn't need to be any of these things. More and more she just wants to be reassured._ A post-finale fic.  
**A/N: **I wrote this particular fic a few months ago, thought it was kind of lame and decided that ONE DAY, _ONE DAY_, I would fix it so it would be fabulous. Sadly that day never really came, but I do want to post it...because 30,000+ words is a lot to let go to waste. I'm not saying it sucks, just that I don't boast it to be something earth shattering or epic. If you do read, I hope that you find it enjoyable! Constructive criticism is always welcome and reviews in general are always wonderful.

This isn't a chaptered story, per se, so much as a very long one-shot. However, I still broke it up into four parts ('chapters') here, as I did on my livejournal. I think some of the formatting may be a little weird, but nothing to jarring, hopefully. It takes place after the season 4 finale, fyi. Credit for the title goes to Damien Rice.

* * *

"I think it is a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is."

-Vladimir Nabokov

* * *

He wakes up, unable to remember the past six years.

She recalls six years ago. Late nights and early mornings; some things truly do not change. But time passes, somehow, and memory blurs to consist of_ cause of death: a ring fracture to the basicranium, perhaps the species as a whole would do well to refrain from BASE jumping,_ and _here's coffee, here's a keyboard and the basics of human interaction have never seemed more simple than when she's writing them herself _and _god, yes, right there_—_next time, can you please refrain from pulling my hair as you reach orgasm? _

At twenty-seven, Temperance spoke to make her thoughts and theories heard, at length and at times too much. In certain moments, silence was disturbing and she spoke then too. How could she not be happy? She was_ so pleased with herself. _She remembers the slow smiles sometimes, drawn for her benefit alone, into mirrors as she passed, storefront windows and examination tables.

It's called self-satisfaction. Emotion slotted firmly under her control and that is the sort of fact she found herself able to accept, find liberating even; far more empty than she pretended and less fulfilling than she cared to admit. And when it pleased her, she made neat attempts at social niceties, indulged in monogamy at intervals and succeeded, as any good anthropologist should, in leaving no marks, no traces of herself at any site where she stepped. Maybe her words rang hollow to her ears, but the slivers of doubt went as they came and always the intention of feeling was there. More than once she tried, pushed a tentative hand against all the rationality and science, her mind still shying away from that cavity where one might find her heart: that strange quagmire of emotion shoved deep behind arterial wall. She stepped carefully, let her feet slip the surface of things and never did she sink. Yet, _oh_, there was an absence that tended to ache and _oh, life isn't lived that way. _

Or it shouldn't be lived that way. It's a tricky distinction, between what things should be and what they actually are.

Booth no longer remembers that sometimes her life is guesswork, that when it comes to what she thinks and how she feels, she likes to be reminded that her suppositions are, in fact, correct.

Booth doesn't remember.

But she does.

_Brennan does._

(Sometimes now his fingers prickle along her spine, _down, down_, to settle across the base of her back, and she wants to forget, only for the moment. To be in this place with him, here and now, and not feel that what made them _BoothandBrennan_ already came and went with his memory.

He touches her differently than before, she thinks. She knows. But the thinking's a thing without control, it happens and she's aware she needs to stop. He skims her surface, fingers light, not in the way she's become accustomed and she swears his hands have grown too warm. Her pulse skips as his palm pushes in, curling round her hip and not deep the way it used to; so suddenly she's wistful, the touch tentative and arousing and her thoughts all the more chaotic for the way her limbs have gone hot, fluid with a kind of feeling that just doesn't go away. Not now. Sometimes she thinks not ever again.

She hasn't a clue of what to call this anymore.

It shouldn't feel this way.  
She smiles faintly, pries his fingers from her back.

She isn't panicking.)

* * *

**Older Chests**

She can remember birch beer. The taste of too much butter and the way it cloyed, salty, to the popcorn and on her tongue.

Her father liked Gary Cooper and he liked the movie _Wings_, and her mother liked to joke that he loved the quarter-second flash of Clara's breasts in it a bit too much. And after this, Temperance's nose would wrinkle, because sometimes her parents were just so..._odd._

The actress' lips were henna red, one slicked so soft against the other in a curve no leading man could ignore. Temperance knew this, could nearly see the cherry pigment in amongst the black and white. She remembers the turn of her head towards her lap, the clandestine purse of her own lips into a perfect Clara bow.

The quiet _pop_ as they pulled apart.

She was the best, her father would say, _you see that smile, those eyes, tempe? every emotion right there on her face. no words necessary. Now that's acting_.

Brennan remembers Clara Bow as Mary Preston, wide-eyed, almost demure with a red cross on her nurse's cap. In the middle of Paris, in the middle of a war, she goes to see the man that she loves. He's tall, handsome in a sharp and classic way—maybe it's just the uniform. Does it matter? He doesn't recognize her. He cannot recognize her, and Jack, _Jack_, he reads blankly from her lips before they turn down into a silent pout, before her body seems to slump and tears latch to her blinking lashes, because she's so magnificent and tragic, a stranger to this man that _she knows_, and _oh_...

_The look on her face._

* * *

So, if it started five years ago over a dead man's body, Booth taking a step toward Brennan and her not taking one back, then she doesn't know where any of it ends. Endings are superficial cutting points; she tells herself they're more than that. She and Booth. For the moment, she shies away from _we_ and _us_. She hates the thought of not knowing where she begins and he ends.

Booth might say, every ending is a new beginning, because he enjoys pithy remarks like a door closes a window opens, like someone for everyone and, conversely, many fish in the sea. Things that sound logical but aren't. This isn't a criticism, it's an observation, one based on having known him very well.

And yet, she desires to be more critical, because at least there is logic in that.

Brennan has come to understand that she is something linear and controlled, even when on the verge of recklessness, and maybe she's no longer prepared for him not to change this. Never was she a space someone wanted to inhabit and Booth feels unshakable and so close to something permanent in this way, maybe for the sole fact of his wanting to be around her. His thumbprints are all over her things. Maybe that stands for something. She knows enough to say that journeys and concepts, feelings and lives, don't end because they're difficult or painful or hard for her to grasp. There isn't an end, but sometimes she thinks this is where it begins—her hatred of hospitals, the short but certain feeling of helplessness—this is how it begins:

His blood is on her hands.

It blushes, she fears, like a second skin over the contours of her palms.

And in its own peculiar way, the sight and the feel of this is enough to make her stomach churn. The metallic smell assaults her nose, scraping at her insides as she draws breath, and in a way that feels like something is clawing its way out her. Maybe something is. The copper taste of iron is sitting in her mouth. It doesn't leave. Not now. Not for two weeks.

He will make her see red again, she will land her fist squarely in his face; and the brush of skin against skin will reassure her in a way it never has before. He had it coming, really, she will think. And then, how dare he, _how dare you_. She couldn't be more livid with him if she tried; her blood is boiling but there's no color in her cheeks. She wants to hurt him, really hurt him, maybe see how far he'll let her go before he's pulling her to his body, before he's breathing things in her ear. Nonsense like, _shhhh, it's alright_, and _Bones_, a hand skirting under her collar and her name soft and soothing. _Bastard, you bastard, bastard, bastard_, she might have whispered back, gripping his skin too tightly. His flesh would purple slightly where her fingers pressed, slowing circulation, something numbing just so he knew how it felt. There are so many variables. And her anger is mercurial, fickle where he is concerned, she knows. Maybe all she wanted was the hug. His heart beating against her very quickly.

_alive, alive, alive_

But for now, there's nothing to satisfy her. He's dead.

And Brennan wonders how she's supposed to do her job as contracted out to the FBI, wonders who she's meant to be a team with now. She must be ignoring an entirety of underlying meaning, a current of metaphor and guilt and all this blood that must be rife with _something _more than plasma and glucose and proteins.

She doesn't like psychology at all.

Blood is blood, that's all, and she wants to wipe her hands of this.

In a way, she thinks, she knew that Seeley Booth would be the sort of person who would take a bullet for her. Though heroism and a willingness to charge blindly, always, for her, was exactly what she never needed. And it's all bound up in something she will never comprehend. But he'd ask her to comprehend, as it's got to be a matter of the heart—_gotta be, Bones_—and hers has got to be bigger and far more full than she believes.

Her heart's eight to ten ounces and would always have been smaller than his; that's anatomical rule and they weren't an exception.

She almost hears the_ yeah, no more smartass remarks, Bones, _sees it forming on his lips as if he were here, _right here_, and not actually dead. But he is. And her green blouse is soaked through and red, like some mockery of Christmas, which she had always found to be kind of a joke anyway. Though there was last Christmas, when he brought her a tree and she pressed her fingers to moist glass like a child who waits up for Santa, only hoping to see Booth more clearly, through the window, and through the snow.

In the hall, the gurney is empty and stripped. The EKG flatlined minutes ago. Before a bathroom mirror she stands and studies, everything and nothing at all; the chipped tiles, the blank look on her face. Brennan wishes there were a lock on the door.

As her eyes catch the light, she figures she's supposed to want to cry.

Three times she blinks, presses her eyes too tightly shut, and nothing. _Nothing_, but perhaps at a different time, she tells herself, under different circumstances, if she weren't Brennan only someone strikingly similar and slightly less at odds with emotion, tears would come. Fast and hard and human. Because it's human to feel loss, to find it necessary to grieve. But she can't say she wants to try.

She should want to try, she thinks.

Water drips from the faucet, pounds a dull pattern against the sink. Slow, it washes over her hands, and she scrubs until they're red again, raw and clean, until—

_  
Sweetie, stop._

Hospitals are horrible places, she knows.

* * *

Booth is lying comatose but breathing.

Brennan wants to speak with him. Why does he find himself so attached to hospital pudding? She's tasted it now and can practically feel the preservatives still sitting on her tongue.

"Vanilla pudding has no flavor," she sighs, though she doesn't know what she's expecting in response. The confusion, the quiet, is palpable and almost foreign to her. She feels silly and a little hurt.

Beneath her thumb his pulse steadies, hair raising as the tips of her fingers trace the skin around his tattoo. _Soul,_ she spells out, like a familiar Braille, from the Kanji at his wrist. She'd like to think that there's a story behind it, one that she'd have learned from a late night at his apartment where he came closing to spilling his soul. Whatever that entails. And _soul_, she might have murmured as he pressed a sweating beer bottle to her palms, if only because she's curious about him, enough to desire a personal knowledge all her own of the markings on his skin. It isn't the alcohol that makes them candid, she supposes, but there's a sort of irony in that it has become a precipitate to him opening up to her, about his past, mostly. _It's called honesty, Bones_, and he curves his lips around the beer bottle. He's thinking. She believes he does this more than he lets on. His hand is consistently hesitant, poised an inch from her hair or the hooks and eyes of her dress, as though touching her again might break her into molecules and atoms, her barest of parts. He does that with people, you know, waits and studies; she must do that with him, because sometimes he's torn. But he talks to her, tells her things, and maybe she's glad.

The tattoo's ink is still stark against the pale of her skin, and her hand seems terribly small. His own is the one with which he holds his gun, and this place between wrist and palm, lunate and scaphoid, is where she feels blood course through him, because he's _breathing_. He's alive, so the shattered pieces stitch themselves back together, yet again, and Brennan breathes more deeply too.

It is reassuring to know that the Inca sometimes drilled holes into the craniums of their living to much success, with tumis and glass scrapers and no legitimate anesthesia, because it is the anesthesia, in the end, that has done this to Booth. So there go her reassurances to him about science and progress, she thinks, up in smoke like a roman candle in her face.

Before even the Inca, certain Bronze Age peoples wore pieces of their own skull on twine around their neck following rudimentary brain surgery, trepanation, and they'd allow the bone to dangle protective, like an amulet, against their chest. She doesn't know the way Booth looked when he was younger, but imagines him for a moment, hair cropped quite short like now, tall and incredibly smart looking in uniform. His St. Christopher medal strung along gold cord and pressed safely to his chest, as though it alone were protection enough from bullets and bombs. Did he truly believe having a saint on his side was enough to keep him alive? Brennan has looked around for the medallion, but can't be sure where it lays now. It isn't with his things.

She watches his mouth part a fraction as she settles back into her seat, his lips a little puckered and dry, like plaster, like orange peel, but it's movement and it reassures her. In winter, he refuses to slather balm on his lips and sometimes they are dry then, too. He's still breathing and her hope isn't false.

What she feels isn't false. Because she feels, she _feels_...wildly speculative. Her fingers tap keys of their own volition, a flurry of words and a story that doesn't try for subtle. And Brennan writes herself into corners.

A corner of an armchair where his body is able to tuck, and her own body able to tuck into his; a snug fit, like femoral head to ilium, like two long-lost puzzle pieces she's always failed to happen upon. They snap into place with the flex of his muscle at her back, and a possessive, clutching hand at her waist, which makes her smile so stupidly because she's brimming with happiness, and Booth leaves her that way, inevitably. Happy.

Her imagination mocks her softly. A baby, her partner, the gorgeous earrings she once saw in the window display at Tous, and a quiet hug at the end of the day, _Bren_.

From where she sits, the view unsettles her. It's too familiar, too prescribed…what Western culture has conditioned women to believe they should want: a family and romance to mask biological imperative.

She wants nothing from Booth she suddenly decides. Nothing at all. She doesn't even want his sperm anymore, so _look_, she wants to say to him. Look how considerate I can be. I can be good. I can do something bad. I can be an island unto myself. Iceland. Melting in all the wrong places and swimming in sulfur.

Maybe Booth dreams with his palms pressed to the sheets, but her mind fashions want and need on the white screen of a word processor, finger at shift and a minor climb from backspace. There comes the clanking noise of keys as a sentence comes to a full stop. It's so telling to her ears and _you love someone you open yourself up to suffering_ swells inside her. She'd like so very much to see him open his eyes. Sometimes it's foolish, the way that she feels, and he'll look at her like she's innocent or naïve, far too endearing for all her science and logic, which grates at her nerves, and yet, for one rare moment she's no idea of what to do or what to say. What it would be like to love him?

Because it happens, she thinks. To people, to humans.

Love.

She exhales.

_delete_

There isn't the proverbial sickening lurch. It needed to go.

And, "Who are you?" he asks a moment later. "You're…where am I?"

His palm opens, curls closed as if to test the air, and for a moment she imagines her hand there in his, trembling a little bit less.

She imagines a lot.

Her tongue slides over her lip, she steps away. "I'm Bones. You're Booth and I'm…"

Booth's eyes widen in his confusion and he shifts under the sheets, enough to make her nearly touch his shoulder with some clamoring need for him to recognize her. "I'm Bones," she says, louder. But this, like the words she's written and erased, is an exercise in futility. And still she tries. She tries, and damns reason just for this moment.

Because _I'm Bones, you're Booth, and together we…we're supposed to be together.  
_

Which sounds ridiculous, really. It is ridiculous. Really.

"I'm sorry, I…I don't…" he whispers, his eyes wide now.

The nurse walks in and brings with her the smell of coffee and something sterile like alcohol. Brennan takes a sharp inhale, feels a sting against her tonsils as her throat begins to burn.

Why doesn't he recognize her?

Before she can make anything of what her senses tell her, she tells herself to stop, _just stop_ with the word associations and the memories, every synapse and neuron still permitting her to think this much. She wants to not think so much. Only, it's impossible for her to shut off like that. Coffee is such a laden word and it swills in her head, mixes among therapy, ice skates, and gum and Buck and Wanda, Roxie and Tony, and always Booth and Brennan and _this_ is what comes of asking to leave her lab, to believe in things transcendent and eternal. Booth's a romantic in the way that she should never hope to be, with his promises and promises and a handkerchief in his pocket.

And what if she cries now, this stranger in his room whose eyes can only seem to scratch, dry, like sand against her lids? Who carries handkerchiefs nowadays anyway? Modernity, progress, is single use, things easily disposed of, like men or like memories, because nothing's permanent, nothing stays. The sudden cynicism is irrational too, like her desire to touch him, to feel him still here—alive and next to her. Her hand falls forward with the way she'd like to press his chest, feel the course of blood and never again the steady gush of it through her fingers. There still has to be the vaguely familiar pound of his heart against her palm, because some things can't possibly be cut away during surgery.

She wants to tell herself not to jump to conclusions, too. Maybe he's simply disoriented, but the logical conclusion is right there in the way that he stares: as though he'd like to know her if he could.

"I told you he'd wake up, Dr. Brennan. I've kept him in my prayers," the nurse says with a smile.

Booth looks idly back at Brennan, confused, as she pulls her fingers away. And it hurts to see that the life behind his eyes isn't quite the same.

She counts her breath more slowly. All of this new to her, too. The way his words roll off his tongue with no conviction at all and the slip in her mindset that allowed her to presume life would show some particular kindness—even for a moment. It's him who's lost something, really, and as if the mechanics of his brain, the intuitive leaps that he makes, weren't perplexing enough in their own right, there's more tucked away. Temporarily or indefinitely or forever, there isn't a distinction here to lessen the blow.

She thinks she's often wanted to be able to see herself the way that he sees her. To somehow understand herself through understanding him. Because his perception may be clouded where she is concerned, but if he can't be objective he's at the very least honest.

But today Brennan is as lost as she looks. And so is he.

"I believe he's suffered some form of retrograde memory loss," she speaks into the empty space before her, the nurse's jaw falling slack at the edge of the room. Brennan gropes for her phone in her pocket, the movement fluid, slow. She thinks the worst thing she could do right now is overreact.

She tells herself not to overreact.

Her hand is unsteady, unsure as she motions to the door, the edges of her mouth wrinkling her lips into a fine line as the EKG pounds out peak after peak.

_alive, alive, alive_

The sound of it somehow more than words could possibly say. And she has no words. Not for this.

His face grows stranger, creasing with some awe and concern for this stranger pressed to the corner of his room. Precise to a fault, she interprets the emotion there. Could trace, her fingers shaky, over the strong angles of his skull, every jutting line corresponding to each ripple of skin, as if to form a lexicon whose contents she may finally comprehend.

He's never been an open book to her. But maybe she knows Booth that well; well enough, at least, to read him.

* * *

She tries to put her finger on what she's feeling and fails.

Maybe she's close to compartmentalizing, there's something knee-jerk and soothing about that entire process. It would be so incredibly easy. And she thinks there must be something wrong with her, to lock emotion away on instinct; she isn't furniture, there's no drawer or secret floorboard where she's meant to shove things she'd prefer not to feel.

Heat replaces feeling. It sears her through her shirt, hot and licking, as she pulls her overheated laptop closer to her body. Two and a half years and eighty gigabytes worth of memory used. She hasn't even got pictures.

And photographs would have been nice, so useful for the recovery of his memory.

Her stomach twists itself into knots, and she works not to think about it as she talks with doctors, and Rebecca, and anyone she can find to speak to who isn't Booth. Only, Booth is the person she speaks to in situations such as this. Booth is her person, as Angela would say.

But then, who needs a person when you have yourself? Brennan thinks it's a little pathetic that she no longer knows how to quell her own nerves.

Everyone is nice to her, pitying. Brennan's not even sure how little time it takes before she begins to catalogue their good intentions, finding something bitter in the way that she does.

She's ineffectual. At the moment, obsolete. At least in Booth's book, and maybe that's the one that has come to matter most.

The doctor's lips twist in confusion as he refers to Booth as her partner. He offers condolences, reasons to remain optimistic and reasons not to set her hopes too high. Before this, he gives a textbook definition of retrograde amnesia that she really doesn't need. "I am also a doctor," she says huffily. And were the circumstances different Dr. Jursic would simply roll his eyes.

There's a message she's yet to listen to. One her father left before Booth woke. She guesses Max mentioned snickerdoodles (an IOU that's a long time coming) and the importance of talking to a loved one while he is in a coma, _not to presume, Tempe, but, you know, if you've been there with him four days, he's gotta be something to you. And your old man can't help but make assumptions._ _A good guy, Booth's a good guy._

Sweets brings pie, as if she'd eat it, as if Booth would be allowed so much as a sniff. If she remembers correctly she kind of laughs in his face when he proffers a mini-therapy session to help her cope. He is the one who is shaky and in need of a hug, but Brennan is not the type of person who can give this to him.

(And maybe she wouldn't have been so great of a mother after all.)

In some ways, all of this is too reminiscent of high school and the way classmates and teachers alike seemed to walk on eggshells, never rude or knowingly cruel, but regarding her with the sympathy and distance given a girl who's wound up living in the homes of strangers.

Angela is the only one who understands that none of this is about Brennan, says _sorry_ and little more. And that's enough…more than enough. Brennan wants to hug her. She wishes there weren't always so many people pressing into their tiny space in the corridor.

On the drive to Booth's place, Angela's face turns gently in Brennan's direction, eyes shining. "For once, please don't be that person, Bren. The rational thing to do here would be to cry."

"Crying is an outlet for environmental stressors that necessitate hormone release as a form of catharsis. Booth woke from his coma, which is cause for neither stress nor tears."

Angela pulls over, almost half a block from Booth's apartment, and Brennan grips the door handle—wanting just to leave.

"Please, sweetie, can you grieve just a little for his sake? He loved you, and you have to have known that. He does love you."

"I'm not sure how to respond…that's so…paradoxical." She turns, bites her lip upon seeing the tears that have dropped onto her friend's cheek. Her fingers tug absently on the hem of her shirt, and she can't quite meet Angela's eyes. "Ange, please. Unlock the door."

And she does, asking once more if Brennan would like her help in getting Booth's clothes. Really it's a one-person job, Brennan tells her again, before she steps out of the car and climbs the stairs to his apartment in twos, thankful for the silence.

In the dark, she knows which key works for which lock, and feels for the light switch as the door pushes open. The heat outside has settled thickly in his apartment, the onset of summer having already bypassed her notice. She pockets a photo of the both of them that's hanging on his fridge, thinking it might help in the recollection of his memories. Only, there's something gaping with it gone, an empty 3x5 space—as though she were never actually here.

And if you ask Booth he'd say that she wasn't.

The knowledge nags at her the way the heat does, stifling and not going away. Not yet.

It hits her at once that this is where he lived, where she sometimes lived too. Living isn't just existing, isn't just _doing_; this sounds like something Booth would say. Maybe he has said it. Her memory feels fainter too.

On the kitchen counter there's a plate still covered with bread crumbs. Brennan dumps them in the trash, mind nearly dulled around the edges, but each nerve in her fingers prickling around the plate. She measures the weight of it in her hand, pinches near the center—holding it in place. It's cold to the touch; a modern, porcelain square that she's always believed to be incongruous with the rest of his apartment. But _she_ fits. She has to fit here.

And it's not that she wants to be bad, it's not that she wants to be clumsy, but she wants to break it. The plate.

Maybe she's lost some modicum of control over herself, but she does exactly that. Lets if slip—drop—from her fingers, without even a nice healthy throw. Maybe she didn't even mean for it to break.

But it does.

There's a loud _crack_ against the silence as it splinters upon impact, pounding the tile of his kitchen floor and landing in a few unsatisfying shards. Quickly, she steps away, the pieces littered at her feet, as her eyes go round, wide. There are tears leaking out, she tries to blink them back. She stops trying. Brennan wipes them on her sleeve, startled.

The kitchen is quiet. She isn't making sound.

She feels unsteady, but very alive, the half understanding of what she's done ringing so temptingly in her ear that all she wants is to break another, though it's absolutely one of the stupidest desires she's ever had. Perhaps a part of her, right now, needs the reassurance that she's not going to be grabbed by her ponytail, strands of her hair breaking off into Mr. Adler's fist as he pulls her from the kitchen to his car trunk. But that notion smacks strongly of psychology and new fears just festering, waiting to replace old ones; it was nonsense like this that she and Booth loathed together. Together. The word's texture, the sound, feels almost chemical; it makes her think of half lives and decay.

In her head she hears Booth saying something like _all things happen for a reason, Bones_ and she thinks she may hate him a little for that.

There's her mouth in her hand and the streaks still on her burning face as she surveys the room, the shadows cast upon this mess she's made. And there isn't a play of light, no poetic way to say she broke something that is his. Something of Booth's, who smiles every time she offers to wash while he dries, as though she achieves some great feat every time she runs her hands under hot water. That first night this happened, their therapists had left, and her hands were warm and wet when he pulled her to his chest, droplets pooling inside her sleeve. How solid and real he had seemed to her then. How odd. Booth only did this once, and maybe he would have remembered the moment more accurately than her. She'd been slightly dizzy on wine at that point, every ounce of the Cabernet having gone to her head. But she recalls having laughed at the reality of Booth being forward, recalls turning into his body before pushing him away, murmuring a lazy _stop_ against the smoothness of his shirt, five fingers curled deep into the hot skin at his back, as if to further her point. _  
Stop _when_ don't stop, Booth_ is what she often means to say.

She thinks there was never a logical reason for them to be so close. And logic should trump love.

Though he said that wasn't always or ever the case.

She wasn't always right, and if anyone were capable of proving her wrong it would be..._well_, maybe he'd have proven her wrong simply because she would have allowed him when it came to that. For him to show her, make her see, that _dammit this is your heart, Temperance, and it's never as rational as you want it to be. _

She wants to see. Every so often that curiosity bubbles up within her.

The prospect of the maybes he spoke of seems like something distant and crude and demanding of a refute from her, or an acceptance or a sigh. Some excitement in her bones that proves she won't recoil from feeling.

Even if feelings, like opportunities, are ephemeral. Passing.

Brennan's eyes move to his bedroom, take in the closet full of his neatly pressed shirts, the suit jackets he complains are monotonous but really, she thinks, are just as much _him_ as the ties and colored socks. Her head feels decidedly light and, swift, she crouches to pick up the shattered china, letting out a soft _oww_ as a sharp edge scrapes at her skin. It hurts and there's no one there to hear.

* * *

Her shoes squeak their way across tile as she comes to a halt outside his hospital door.

First, she decides, she should tell him about the extent of the amnesia, ask about the dream he mentioned. The mind is complex enough for some of his lost memories to have manifested themselves in the form of a dream.

Second, she should introduce herself. _Dr. Temperance Brennan._ Just like the first time, only without the frown on her face and the smugness behind his eyes.

Maybe she's meant to introduce herself before mentioning his memory. Most cultures dictate formalities should precede matters of business.

Just…this isn't formality or business, _it's them_.

She sighs, chews her lip with her teeth.

She wants him to like her.

She wants him to remember her. But first, she really wants him to like her.

* * *

When Brennan considers the history of the universe, the stars that have aligned and pulled apart time and time again, six years is not nearly so much as the day to day permits her to think.

Booth remembers nothing of the past six years. But retrograde amnesia, in most cases, is temporary. So there's that.

There are good odds that he'll remember.

She tells him this as she drops his duffel bag onto the chair in his room. Booth in particular might appreciate probabilities and near certain odds. Long after he stopped being a gambler, he still liked a good gamble.

His poker chip is lying with his things on the bedside table. He smiles when she attempts to flip it in the way he sometimes does. It's cool and reassuring to her, though intrinsically valueless, and she pushes the tiny disc deep into her palm.

"I'm Temperance Brennan. Your partner, within the context of our jobs," she says finally, averting her eyes to her hands when he says nothing in response. "I'm a forensic anthropologist at the Jeffersonian and four years ago I blackmailed you into letting me do field work. We're friends, which is the reason why I'm here."

He introduces himself, too, on a confused sort of laugh; only, she doesn't think the situation is funny at all. Her eyes narrow and he grabs for the poker chip from between her steady fingers. "Look, Temperance, I want to remember my life—seeing my son grow up, and knowing you. I want to remember you." She shifts, knowing she's done this all wrong. "So, I wasn't _literally_ laughing, you know."

She nods.

She's a stranger to him. She's Temperance. She wants to go.

There's that photo, still in her pocket, and it feels almost unnecessary now if someone's already painted a fairly accurate picture of their partnership to him. Really, she's the only person able to do that, the only one to have experienced it, so she pulls the photo out and places it before him. He whispers, very near to her face, something about pudding. And _oh, Booth_, she wants to breathe back to him. _Booth_ and then, maybe to touch him or to reach for his face. Something standard and quick. "This is us, four months ago. We were friends," she says instead, stilted, then turns red at having repeated herself. "And we had just solved a case."

He nods in understanding and looks from the photograph to her, a bit of a smirk on his face. "You're beautiful. I'm thinking that's why I let you blackmail me."

"I'm quite intelligent. I really don't think I gave you any other option but to do as I asked."

He gives a gentle smile and strokes his thumb over the top of her hand, painfully quiet, not asking any of the questions she feels so prepared to answer. She wasn't sure Booth was capable of surprising her anymore, but he's doing exactly that: somehow making this both awkward and not. "I think that I'm lucky to have you," he whispers.

"I feel that interaction of this sort…flirting…"

"Flirting?" he asks, and her mouth pulls into a sour little frown.

"Yes, flirting could be bad. We didn't do that and it could hinder the retrieval of your memories."

He stares at her a moment and she clears her throat before changing the subject. Booth does a sort of half-way roll of his eyes, and secretly she relishes it: the first truly familiar thing he's done today.

Booth remembers Parker as a baby, his days in the army, and cases he'd worked long before meeting her. He remembers his thirty-first birthday and his back not hurting like hell, like it does now. He's general with his answers, maybe beginning to grow tired. Maybe unsure of exactly how much she knows about him. A part of her wonders, too, if this Booth is still a little bit in love with Rebecca. Though she doesn't ask. What matter is it to her?

And is it bad, he asks (because questions are safer than statements, than declarations, for now) that he doesn't know what the last thing he remembers is. That there's no landmark, no Capitals game or moment of holding his son that he can pinpoint as his most recent memory.

He looks up at her, tilts his head with the question. She almost follows suit on impulse, the movement, she's certain, almost muscle memory for the both of them. The idea of this is a small comfort to Brennan, and she feels a smile begin to creep across her face.

This is Booth.

"That isn't bad at all," she says quietly.

"What you said earlier today…that's what I call you, isn't it? Bones?"

"Yes."

He shakes his head. "I don't like it."

"I'm fairly certain I wasn't supposed to either." Her eyes move to meet his. "Brennan is fine."

"No. No, not if I used to call you Bones."

"It would be like me calling you…Seeley. Somehow not fitting at this point. Just call me Brennan."

"Okay, Bones," he says, very serious, and they both laugh a little at that. Nervously. She, at least, still feels uncertain.

"Okay, Seeley," she says slowly. He smiles as the foreign word falls from her lips, too strange for her to possibly say again. "Booth," she whispers, face in his face. "There's a high likelihood that this is going to work, that you are going to regain your memory, because I don't fail at anything. _We_ don't fail at anything. You should remember that as you attempt to remember your life."

He nods and she squeezes his hand, quickly, and not too hard. She smiles almost sweetly for him.

"You'll be here tomorrow?" he asks.

She nods. "And today. I-I'll be here today, if that's alright." She gestures vaguely to the chair at her back.

"Yeah. Yeah, _of course_."

* * *

"The key," Sweets tells her, "is not to inundate him with facts. A man like Agent Booth is more likely to recall the emotions of an event before the details. Be honest with him and the rest may start to fall into place."

Sweets leaves in the _Agent_ Booth. It's kind, the way the smallest of gestures sometimes manage to be. Everything he's said sounds too profound and far too full of sense to be coming from their therapist. And in some ways it sounds difficult, too. Honesty is easy, but to consistently replace facts with words that are supposed to make Booth _feel_ is something she's not certain she's equipped for.

"That is useful information," she says all the same, a curt nod of her head and a frown in Sweets' direction as he walks away.

She's better with words when she's writing them down and creates for herself the painstaking task of outlining what to say and how to say it. Worries that with Booth she will invariably stray from script; Angela tells her that would be a good thing.

"Bren, you're not being honest with the man if you've already planned the entire conversation. Everything about you two is organic, surprising, you know? Just…you shouldn't let that change."

Brennan is well aware that there exists more than just facts, more than who said what, when and where and why. Though, without these things, she worries that someday she too will forget.

_This is the way I knew you_, she tells him when she sees him next, nervous as she slips into the chair beside his bed, because _maybe it's only facts, but I'm not sure how else to convey the course of our partnership to you._

He's made a deal with a pretty nurse where he can leave in three days, so long as his vitals remain stable until that time. After that it will be nothing but mind exercises, neurologists and psychotherapists. Brennan knows that he hates those things, doesn't want to turn their time together into glorified therapy, though already she feels that stern professor-like set of her lips, and already he's learned that his smile may melt nurses, but absolutely not her. She isn't hopeless, it's true, even if she feels her will begin to slip, quick and easy, at the barest hint of a grin from him. Her unflinching _no_s begin to wear away into _yes, okay, you're really very nice _at the upward pull of his lips. Because many people may smile at her over the course of her lifetime, but not like Booth. Never like Booth.

_There are a multitude of reasons for someone to smile. I just couldn't always grasp what yours were. People smile when they catch the meaning of a joke, you would smile when I didn't understand one. You were overprotective and used to put your hand on my back or my shoulder, as though touching me would somehow affect…something. I don't know. I'm not saying I didn't care for it, I just didn't know what it meant. Maybe it meant nothing at all. I once said that we hardly touch each other, but there came a time when that assessment was incorrect. Over time people change, it's inevitable, though you once said that we wouldn't. That was also incorrect. Sometimes you would bring me coffee far too early in the morning, especially when I'd declined to go to breakfast with you. I like my coffee two sugars, no cream, and back when you didn't like me, you would put in Splenda instead then tell me it was an accident. You knew I hated the taste of it, and you haven't accidentally done that in a very long time. You had an alcoholic and abusive father, you had to finish college while you were overseas and you named your son after your spotter in the Rangers. I was buried alive, along with a colleague of mine, and when you found us you dug me out of the dirt with your hands, and I-I've never known anyone like…in some ways you're rather extraordinary. I never lost faith in you, not after that moment, not now. And I don't believe in a great many things: self-determination and justice and myself mostly, but not God, and maybe that was something you never understood, but I believed that you would find me.  
I can't speak for you in any of these situations, but these are things I know. I know you, Booth._

He's silent and it would seem she doesn't know how to be. There's a flush rising in her face, five of her fingers have bunched around his bedsheet. She loosens her pull.

"I didn't intend to sound quite so…impassioned. I just want to do this correctly."

"You are doing this right. It's me with the problem," he says, and gives a low laugh that's forced. She hates the sound of it, hates the thought of Booth being insincere with her. "You never wondered what all of that meant?" he asks.

"I did." Her eyes fall closed for a moment, almost shyly, but she's resolved. "I'm here to help you recover your memories. We should get started."

"The whole faith thing, it goes both ways, Bones."

"That's premature, considering your condition…but thank you."

_It's strange knowing more about you than you know about me. It's always…not like this, Booth. You knew my passwords, I couldn't even begin to guess at yours. Do you think that means something? Because some people did.  
_

He's restless, and he watches the news constantly, reads newspapers and magazines and is voracious in his attempt to know everything about this world that he cannot remember. She is almost tempted to bring his Southpark DVDs, with the obese kid who spews expletives, if only because the headlines look so incredibly bleak on his bedside table.

His brow creases in concentration upon hearing her question. "I think that everything means something," he tells her. "But I also think I probably just create better passwords than you. Let me guess, were they anything like…skeleton, skull, scapula? Seeley?"

"You've got a lot to learn," she says, her lips pulled tight as she tries not to smirk.

"Ah…but if you didn't know mine, Bones, then so do you."

It's true. She wants to know him better than she did before. What is his opinion of hybrid fruits? Of drilling in Alaska? Of swine flu, secret societies, and tantric sex? Did he ever see that she dedicated a book to him? What five books would he take with him to a desert island? Does he even like to read? Democrat or Republican? Boxers or briefs? (She knows, but enjoys the stammering a little too much.) Does he really pretend to be less intelligent for her sake? What's the worst thing he's ever done? How many times has he been in love? With whom?

Whom. The _m_ is pretentious he's told her, especially coming from her mouth. She tastes the word on her tongue, wanting a chance to annoy.

"Temperance…" he draws out apologetically. He grasps for her arm as she draws back.

'Bones', she mouths wordlessly to him, and straightens in her chair. "You're right. I don't pretend I don't still have a lot to learn. But I-I always thought it would be better if we were more balanced in that respect, when it came to knowing, or rather, not knowing things of that nature. Passwords. And other details deemed socially significant."

"And it's not?"

"Better, you mean?" He nods and she licks her lip, choosing just to be honest. "I suppose not."

_We had this strange interaction where we were dancing and singing and laughing all at the same time. It was…fun. You went to grab something from the fridge and got blown up while Foreigner was still playing. You had two broken ribs, a greenstick fracture of your… _she stops herself before she starts to ramble _and you still turn that song up when we're driving in your car. I've never understood why you do that Booth, I can still listen to 'Girls Just Wanna Have Fun' but it doesn't make me happy. _

He asks why she doesn't like that song in particular as they sit beside each other in the hospital cafeteria. The food's tasteless, they buy coffee instead. "Your blood was running over my hands, I was applying pressure and you went into shock before the paramedics arrived." Experimentally, her hand presses to the place on his chest where she knows his wound was. It's unnecessary, he's likely already noticed the scar tissue.

"Death is inevitable, but I'm not sure that if you had actually died it would have been easy for me in the long run. I can't imagine working with anyone else. Humans, myself included, have complex grieving processes," she whispers, her fingers pulling from the fabric of his shirt as she remembers they're in public.

"I can't remember any of this. In some ways, for you, isn't that nearly as difficult as if I had...you know..."

"Died?" Her brow lifts in disbelief.

There, already lost in the tangle of thoughts at the back of her mind, she wonders how he can draw a comparison like this. She'd never dropped a dish on purpose before, never found the smell of his blood, or anyone else's, enough to be sickening. Now she's done both, felt both, and doesn't know that one is necessarily better than the other.

There's a simple, anthropologically acceptable, ethnographically-explored answer, so she doesn't know what makes this hard. She comes back to _if a tree falls in the woods, and there's no one there to hear, does it make a sound?_, and thinks that maybe she's the tree Booth doesn't remember being there to hear. Metaphorically speaking. And that notion is hard to swallow, like death: something she has no control over. She doesn't want to hate philosophy, too.

"I'm trying not to be selfish, though you're right. It isn't easy."

"I think you're doing an excellent job," he says, pouring sugar into her cooling coffee. The sight makes her happy, unbelievably so. Over the table, she slides the cup toward her body, smiling as she imagines the sucrose dissolving right there before the both of them.

"People are worried I'm pushing you too much with all of this." There are worry lines, a crease the pillow case has left on his face. She'd like to break the silence with a note on how he'll be happy to sleep in his actual bed. "You should tell me when you're tired," she murmurs instead.

He shrugs, pointing a stirrer from beside her face. He's so earnest it gives her a small thrill. "You should tell me if I'm keeping you from your work," he breathes, serious and almost in her ear.

"You are but…maybe it's worth it. Maybe I think this is worth it."

"I'm glad you believe that."

"And perhaps…soon you'll remember _why_ I believe that." She peers down into her cup, the steam stinging her face. Always, for her, it will be him that said this was worth it first.

"Or you could, uh...you know you could always tell me now," he reasons with a nonchalant shrug, a glance thrown across the room.

And she could. She could tell him she thinks that she probably loves him and that she has no clue what to do with that. Especially now. Because really, what does that even mean? She feels herself moving forward without love, suddenly more fearful of a life devoid of it than almost anything else. She wants to be braver about this. To tell him it's the little things like a packet of sugar and a pig figurine that have always meant a great deal to her.

She should find words, meaningful words. Learn to be honest with both herself and with him.

"I don't know how," she says, her voice thick and defensive now. "It's like the coffee. You didn't just wake up knowing how I like it, you needed me to tell you. Sometimes I need to be told something before I can fully understand it myself. Before I can tell someone else. At least, I think that's how it works."

He nods, slowly, mouth fitting over the rim of his cup. For the first time she is afraid the liquid might be too hot, that he may burn himself. Her hand lifts in warning but he doesn't seem to notice. He's careful anyway, with or without her. He's painstaking and careful, no one gets burned.

"Well, at least the second time around we've skipped the Splenda and gotten straight to the real thing," he says lightly, his voice almost nervous but warm.

Brennan doesn't know whether to laugh, because it sounds like a joke and maybe she should have learned by now to tell whether or not something is. His fingers are drumming the edge of the table, each _tap tap_ heightening her anxiety as he studies her. She feels dense, as if this would typically be a moment where he might pull out her name in fondness and surprise. _You've gotta be kidding me, Bones, you've never heard of such and such person/place/thing?_

She finds herself clinging to the possibility of a moment that's familiar.

"I don't know if that was supposed to be a metaphor. You knew I had trouble understanding them at times. But we were never-"

"Artificial? I get it. Really, I do," he cuts in. His fingers are moving still and her own move to stop them, striking dryly against his knuckles. She smiles slowly, in spite of herself, as his gaze falls on her overlapping hand. "It was real," he says, and she believes she understands now, too, what they had, what the both of them have lost. The empty chatter, the scrape of chairs on linoleum, no longer cuts in between their conversation. It's become almost background to his words, and there's a somber turn to his smile as he stares over at her.

"You know, it was the real thing. _This is something real._ I get that, Bones, just…stop speaking in the past tense, okay? I'm right here."

* * *

Her first day back at the lab, her hands itch for anything to take her mind off of him. She works tirelessly, thinks that maybe, _maybe_ this is what it's like to feel shaken to her very core and in such a way as to leave her desperate to be of use to someone, to these nameless skeletons even, because the reassurances and slivers of optimism she's found herself able to verbalize before cut sharp, shard-like and chunking in her throat. She hopes that there isn't a case from the FBI waiting in the queue. Somehow, she can't bear the thought of working with anyone else. At least, not yet.

It's when she is paused outside of Angela's office, though, that her heart drops toward her stomach like a stone.

"It's sad, yes, but in a way it's kind of romantic," she hears her friend say. "Heartening almost. He's discovering her for a second time. All the quirks, all the things he must have found endearing before, he's finding endearing again. It makes me believe that there is one person out there for each of us, that one day even I will wake up knowing exactly who I'm meant to love. Even if I know nothing else."

There's a soft rustling of pages, the gentle susurrus of someone else speaking that leaves the moment up to Brennan's imagination. Her teeth pull tightly at her lip as Angela's lilting voice reaches her ears once more.

"Really," Angela murmurs, sincere in a way only she knows how to be, "how many of us get second chances? They were stagnating, maybe this time he won't be so afraid, you know. And Brennan too."

_Brennan too.  
_

She wants to laugh, very loudly so someone will hear. So Angela will know that she thinks stagnation is sleeping with your ex-fiancee on the Cleopatra bed for a reason called _just because_. It's unnerving, stinging almost, to hear oneself be talked about.

Brennan shifts in the corner, envious of Angela's rose-colored outlook, her lack of moderation and realism. People think a lot of things about her and Booth, most of them untrue.

The thing is, there's nothing romantic about this at all.

* * *

For the record, she isn't upset with Angela. Angela has always been the first to pry, to ask questions and to find something acceptably sweet in almost everything. Even her. Brennan never knew she had quirks, but she supposes all humans must. It's the people who notice them that must know her very well.

"You know," Ange says, standing beside her in the bone room, "it's true, Bren. Nothing happens just once. You were the one who told me that. Remember?"

A confused expression. Angela is talking in circles again. "What has this got to do with anything?"

"I feel sad for you, sweetie. Watching you act like all of this means nothing makes me sad. Because it does mean something. It absolutely does. Right now, it means everything to you and no one will think less of you for admitting that." Angela sighs, blowing a bit of hair out of her face. "If it were me who couldn't remember, I would hope that somewhere inside you there would be at least a twinge of sadness," she says.

Brennan turns to her friend, curling an ilium under her hands. Bones are not always brittle, not at all dry. Not fresh ones, not ones that are living. You break them and they're porous with marrow, you bend them and most days they give. She is only flesh and bone, and people find it healthy for her to break when things should be too much. But Brennan feels this word give, she wants it, wants to bend the way grass does, through weather and circumstance, and not lose her shape. She desires a restoration to what she knows as normal, wants to smile or to cry. She wants it to be acceptable for her to do neither.

"I _am_ sad, Ange," she says simply, and turns back to her work.

And maybe the sad part is this: admitting this weakness in herself changes nothing at all.


	2. Chapter 2

Here is something she remembers. Hop Li's, sometime last fall.

She shrugs off her coat, he pulls out her chair. He's being so formal and stiff, she wants to laugh at him. In the way he sometimes does that says _bones, you're not grasping the situation, the meaning, the context at all_. Booth, you're not grasping the situation at all. Nor the meaning. Nor the context. This is what she wants to say to him. He's practice for her, and she for him. Not the real thing. Surrogate. It all sounds very nice at the time.

The dress she wears is satin and blue, something the color of sapphire, dark the way the ocean turns at high tide. It peels back to show skin, a teasing sort of dip between her breasts. So, that's what a date is anyway, Teasing: look but don't touch. Little games, small rewards. It's a testament to human intelligence, the way mating rituals have turned so complex. It's a testament to human boredom also, she told Angela once; children like games too.

Tonight, Brennan was supposed to be on a date. At an art gallery in Georgetown. Is it shocking that she's with him instead? She wants to be with him instead. Booth.

Booth. Booth. Booth.

Thank you for this surrogate relationship, Booth, the sake and the jokes across the table. Booth, who's there to encourage lines, and pie, and Christmas time; to take the bullet and uncuff from the bench. Thank you for the perplexity and confusion, Booth, for the tofu from your hot and sour soup and for laughing at the fortune cookie fortunes, because they were unoriginal and strange, don't you agree? It all aligns somehow. He talks of a fate and things meant and felt and already planned, but she _wants_ to be here, chooses to hug back, to let dates go interrupted, to split the eggroll, and isn't that better? Isn't the wanting always better?

He studiously avoids staring too closely. It's something practiced; not aversion, but still he averts his gaze. "Bones," he says, though she doesn't know why—maybe he's warning her. They both go silent and relaxed. It's wonderful to be this way.

To be partners and close. So close.

Some men have wandering eyes. Booth's fingers wander instead. They slip to the inside of her thigh, like a game. Games are for cowards. Touch but don't look. He's touching, she must not look. A palm presses her patella, she greedily accepts. Brennan feels him, warm and under her skin, not parasitic but intractable; she wants to be with someone, _someone_, why is he always in the way? Why can't he be only someone to her?

There's a sharp draw of breath, her own, as she looks around in earnest, a curious gaze at the fried rice, a shaky grab for her splintered chopsticks. His hand makes her hungry. He's tracing on her skin, a circle, something round as though his fingertips won't decide a direction.

Nobody sees, not even her.

She almost shudders.

But this isn't what happens. The fingers, the shaky grab. It doesn't happen. It goes like this:

"Bones," he says in his warm and usual way, though she doesn't know why. They go silent and relaxed. It's wonderful to be this way. She couldn't ask for a better partner.

"Booth," she says, almost sly, "what you said earlier, in Sweets' office, I-"

"Bones, you _are_ going to find someone eventually. I don't say things I don't believe to be true, you know that," he cuts in, an intent expression on his face, his words familiar and so certain she can hardly stand it.

"And you too. You will find someone eventually too…I suppose. So that makes this temporary. All things are."

"Not all things." He gives up on chopsticks, grabs for a fork.

"Life is temporary," she says frankly, decisive and annoyed. He cannot move her. She's that smart. She's had that much wine.

"Not love, Temperance. Hey…not love," he whispers into her face, knuckles swaying briefly against her own as he bounces his palm on his knee. He doesn't reach for her nearby hand, but then, she doesn't reach for his either.

It isn't even a question anymore of whether he's a good influence, like he says. Good or bad, it's an influence all the same, and she hasn't yet developed a tolerance. No temperance, and she thinks of how that sounded on his lips. His lips that are moving and near. He was a horrible kisser, she's decided. What good would it be to conclude otherwise? He tasted bitter, like the coffee he drinks black. She believes that she tasted like gum; how impersonal.

She should say something, she understands; he's watching her, his eyes flustering and hot. Don't expect anything from me, she wants to tell him.

"I can feel you staring, do you think I like that?" she murmurs, turning her face away. Across the room, people are chattering, laughing in the way they have been all night and her face feels hot, like someone's pressed something warm against it, like she's touched something electric and alive. She's stark under his gaze and Booth is doing this on purpose. Apply pressure—he probably thinks he's teaching her something.

"Do you?" he whispers, staring still. He rolls his eyes, wanting to lower his face too, she knows. Booth hates confrontation with her, hates awkwardness and uncomfortable moments. It's why he fills them with affection and jokes. Maybe she stole that from a therapy session. He's making her dizzy.

"Sweets is-" he falters, his expression gone grim. "Bones, look at me," he says slowly and she does. He's looking very darkly at her mouth, her eyes, anywhere but the dip between her breasts. "Sweets is wrong."

That's like telling her the sky is blue. She doesn't comprehend his point. She doesn't comprehend…

"Why do we talk about these things? Why can't we talk about something topical?" she says to him, smoothing out the folds of her dress.

Topical. Like the election or the war. What are his opinions?

She sighs, picks at her food.

"Topical…like going dutch treat on dinner?" he says, a return to a smug grin as he stretches back into his chair, the mood considerably lighter now. He grabs a mint from beside the check, tossing it towards her. She catches and the both of them laugh.

"No." She beams, feeling settled. "No, that's completely out of the question," she says, popping the hard candy into her mouth, the plastic crinkling between her fingers. Booth turns away then, a hand on his tie, the buttons of his shirt, and she wonders what he's thinking. Probably that he's right and she prefers his eyes on her.

She thinks, now, that she should look closely at this. This memory. Look closely, because he turned indifferent, _they_ turned indifferent with time.

She didn't know what she wanted. She thinks he knew that too.

* * *

It's three days until they release him from the hospital and everything moves along on schedule. He's home, and he's happy, and that makes her happy in turn. Maybe sometimes things really are as simple as that.

Her legs cross neatly beneath her as she sits facing him at the foot of his bed, all of their dinner spread before them in foam trays, his room smelling of curry now. This is unsanitary, and she can only imagine Booth rolling over into a pool of wet chutney in the middle of the night, because he's making such a mess at the moment and each _relax, Bones_ only makes her want to change his sheets.

His back is flat and flush with the headboard, and he rubs that empty patch of skin on his head, his shirt a deep blue and _comfortable_, he says, because there's no one here to lift it, to press metal instruments to his chest or IVs in his arms. No nurses hovering then neglecting at intervals. But there's _her,_ and Brennan will stay the night, and the night after that, because there isn't a circumstance under which she wouldn't be here for him when he needs her. And he needs her.

She leans to swat his hand from his healing scalp, rankling the short tips of hair that stand tousled, as they are often wont to when he's only just woken up. Again, there's the thought of a younger Booth, not just the uniform but what he would have been like. What they might have been like, when she would have been young enough, naïve enough, to still be swayed. People can't go years without eventually dissolving into one another's space in some shape or form—even now she's not excluded from that. Maybe the real question then, all those years ago, would have been, why prolong the inevitable? She's lonely and he's lonely and that's enough for your typical spark of romance to occur—we met in a bar and he used some terrible line—_do you come here often?_ or _I don't know if you're beautiful or not, I haven't gotten past your eyes yet_, and what a jerk, she might have thought. And then, later, how broken, how misaligned the bones must once have been in the arm he wraps around her, how fractured silence can become when he's upset with her. She hates not to feel rational but there are arguments outside the grocery store, inside the car, so, what a jerk, she thinks again. What a cocky ass, she says. He's got a hero complex and when he makes love to her he lays kisses at every juncture of her skin, thinks that he can be careful enough, gentle enough so that one day all of her will heal. It's selfless, sweet, so absolutely unnecessary. And maybe his idea of a date is a hockey game and maybe hers is a documentary to be watched, but there are concessions to be made, a kiss long and slow at the back of the bookstore, fingers dancing over skin and her spine aligned with the shelving—his hands are so warm—or a granted wish to leave at halftime, so long as dinner isn't vegetarian. How easy, she thinks, their lives might have been. How easy and how unoriginal. How painfully dull to be only Temperance and Seeley. To be only Bren. No crimes to solve, only love, love, love.

"Rude to stare, Bones. Very, very, rude," he teases, sending an accusatory look that makes her scoff.

"You don't look very Catholic at the moment."

"Good to know your science lets you make observations like that."

"It isn't science at all. Scientific would be me saying your maxilla and mandible aren't entirely aligned, and you have a slight underbite."

"Yeah?"

"_Slight_."

"This is not good for my head." He points his fork to his left temple, and she really thinks he might benefit from developing a true sense of danger. Those prongs are rather sharp. "This vein that's throbbing—it's you," he says, as she pushes the fork away from his face.

"_That_ vein?" she points.

"Yeah, _that_ vein."

"That's an artery. And you have a hole in your cranium now, so that should alleviate pressure," she says, then wonders if she might have been more sensitive. Her lips curve into a smile. "I only meant you look rakish, okay."

"You mean rakishly good looking."

"No, I mean rakish. Less buttoned-up, more...devil-may-care."

"Devil-may-care? What is this, 1930?"

"No, but I think the censor boards would have appreciated your skittishness when it comes to discussing things sexual in nature."

"See, you just keep digging that hole," he grounds out, and the hint of a smile ghosts his face.

"I suppose I wanted to know if it still makes you nervous, the mention of sex. Your face is turning red. And your neck."

"Now you're experimenting on me?"

"No. I simply never understood the embarrassment or shame you derived from discussing it."

"You see this face, Bones? I'm not ashamed and I don't blush." He gestures emphatically at the color slowly rising in his cheeks.

"You're blushing," she says primly.

He's blushing. His face is tinged the slightest shade of red, and he heaves a breathy sigh. It warms the silence and hits her lightly, right between the eyes, like everything from him she's come to appreciate and also come to expect.

"We often communicate in this way, so that was refreshing," she says after a moment's pause, smirking just a little because _this _is bickering and kind of makes her want to laugh.

"Telling me I'm a prude?"

"What I told you is that your hair looks pleasant like this. Unstyled."

"_Pleasant?_"

"Yes."

He chuckles, points his fork at her.

"Here's the thing, Bones, I have no hair," he says, and her eyes soften as she feels him shift uncomfortably on the bed. "Come on, stop. You know I don't want that," he continues, nodding toward the sympathetic look that's settled on her face.

"You do have hair. You mean on your head, right?" she asks.

"_Yes_, on my head."

"You do."

"Yeah, let's change the subject, okay?"

"Okay."

There follows a vacant silence and she pushes food around her almost empty plate, shoulders beginning to curve inward because the mattress is so soft and makes her feel slouchy.

"You're not sleeping on the couch. You know, it's bad enough I'm keeping you from that swanky downtown apartment you've got," he says, joking, and her gaze leaves her plate to meet his.

She laughs softly. "My apartment isn't swanky, and that's an incredible supposition to make when you haven't even seen it." Her fingers fold around the single piece of bread that sits between them, motioning gently toward his body with it, as if to make a point. "You get your bed, I get the last piece of naan. That's the way it works," she explains.

But he pulls the bread from her hand and breaks it in two, handing her the slightly larger bit. "We're adults, we can share," he says, holding the piece away until she cocks her head and begrudges him a small nod.

"What makes you think I'd want to subject myself to your snoring all night?" she whispers, face lowering a fraction, because the truth over this hint of a lie is that she finds the quiet in-and-out of his breath at night close to calming. At least, that's what she remembers, and he shrugs slightly, pulling his piece of naan through the remaining tikka sauce as her brow raises at his silence.

He laughs a little as she wrinkles her nose, reclining, once more, against the headboard. But the movement's too hard. It brings gravy from a tray pouring onto the floor in an ugly amber wave.

"Shit-"  
"God-"

Brennan alights from the bed with a napkin in hand, and she presses it quickly to the carpet, rising to grab a wet towel before his hand halts her, reaching around her waist and curling into the fabric there. He brings her stomach level with his face.

"What-" she breathes, and that's all, because she can think of nothing more to say, and the feel of his breath through the cotton of her shirt is a little too unexpected, a little to direct. She stares oddly down at him, not caring much to stay here, in this place with him, but not knowing how to articulate that either, so she allows herself the distraction of his fingers as they draw _down_, _down, _to hold her hip. It's all so timid, so slow. She blinks and finds she's been holding a ragged breath in expectation, because he's never pressed her this close without at least the pretense of impending danger; exploding transmitters, or _you're great at what you do, Bones, but_ _you don't solve murders, cops do_.

"Look, it's a bed, Bones. Sometimes people only sleep in them," he says, staring up at her, and she frowns in confusion. His hand is warm.

"Which is why I find the phrase 'sleeping with someone' very indirect and unnecessary if what people really mean is that they're having sex. I'll sleep in Parker's bed, if that's alright," she says.

And for her there's a flush of relief when he nods wearily, stands and walks past her toward the kitchen, because this has been awkward and odd, everything they're not with each other. She's always been awkward, capital-A Awkward, her adult life punctuated by men with whom sharing space at the end of the day was a mere formality to follow sex. There's still that gangly girl in there who could never have managed a demi-plié, whose hips never quite adopted that seductive sway that in high school got you more than a prank Secret Santa gift taped to your locker, who went on to sleep with Stires because, _Tempe, you're brilliant_, and in the moment it seemed more than true and more than enough. It's enough for time to have deemed that this is who she was, and maybe who she _is_, but it isn't what she wants. Not with Booth. She wants to be a reason for someone to remember, reason enough for someone to stay.

In the end, she never is.

The tikka masala seeps and pools quietly into a stain atop the carpet and she tries to ignore it. She's hyperaware, hypersensitive suddenly to this mess.

"You need to get back in that bed," she tells him when he returns with papertowels, and he looks to her with a laugh, something like _bossy_ sounding from his lips as he crouches to wipe up the food, his body curving at the waist and all she can think is _his back, his back, his back._

She bends, too, quickly, with a move to pull the towels from his hands. Only, the maneuver's too uncoordinated, and as her body angles toward his their foreheads knock with a loud clink of their skulls.

"Oh god," she gasps, eyes rounding off into that deep shade of blue that spells out every bit of her horror to him. Slowly, her fingers slide over the length of his face, tracing up to the bare spot of skin where she believes their heads had met. She's oblivious to the small bump blooming on her own forehead until she feels his thumb press carefully there.

"Are you alright?" she whispers.

"Bones, really, you've gotta relax," he says, for what might be the seventh time that evening, and she gives a small sniff, finding that despite her best attempts, she's really very terrible at taking care of him. Maybe he would have been better off for the next few days with an honest-to-goodness nurse.

"Okay," she says, and _relaxes_, or tries very sincerely. She settles back onto the edge of the bed to watch his hands as they work, her own entwining loosely at the base of her lap. _Okay_, she repeats softly again, and only to herself. Okay, and that's exactly how she feels. It isn't terrible, but it's a step too far from good.

She wants for them to be good again.

That night, there's no will to fall asleep, no pull to drift off and curl under the crisp sheets she's laid out over Parker's bed. Her feet lead her soundlessly to the living room, finger slipping over the light switch in the hallway before her eyes catch the silhouette of his couch, the small adjacent cabinet where he keeps the liquor that tends to make her sleepy.

She begins to wonder when he'll remember what he's forgotten, pushes back an unkempt curl, and replaces _when_ with _if_. If only because there's certainty in almost nothing, no confidence levels she can apply to lives no longer quite recognizable as their own. With a frown, her fingers fit around the neck of a bottle, the glass tinkling.

"You've gotta be kidding me," she hears from the edge of the room.

A shadow moves in her direction. Booth.

"I couldn't sleep," she says.

He laughs and she smiles, and it's a good thing, she thinks, that she didn't go to sleep in the same bed as him. She imagines her body rolling too close then awkwardly too far, foreheads bumping in the night and becoming cause for concern.

Her thigh presses to the arm of the couch and then to his when he joins her there, and she wishes he would speak. He covers her hand with his.

Somewhere there remains the simple barrier of a line, one that he can't remember and she's never much cared for navigating her toe or any part of her around. But there it is, something palpable. His body brushes hers, one clumsy scrape of skin, and she notes this duly, never having cared to search out the points at which they inevitably connect, but always caring. She hopes he understands this still.

"Did I wake you?" she asks.

"No," he says, with an honest shake of his head. And _that's Booth_, that's always been Booth, she knows. He wouldn't tell her even if she had.

He leans forward and grabs for a tumbler, waving a hand at the small cluster of liquors. "Pick your poison, Bones. Is this sort of a regular thing, where I catch you breaking into my liquor cabinet?" he teases.

"No. I had scotch once." She shoots him a wry sort of grin and gestures toward what looks like the brandy, because Angela once tried to pour it into her coffee, saying it would really warm her up. Maybe it's not even the right kind of warm, but she needs it.

He places the glass in her hand, and afterward she takes a generous swig, seeing his lips turn up from the corner of her eye. The brandy swills in her mouth then slips down the back of her throat sweet and hot, a slow burn that distracts. Because he's staring at her still, eyes flustering and hot, like the brandy, raking like she's something he'd like to press his fingers to and it nearly forces a cough from her lips. Brennan feels a little bad; she knows that he can't drink. She half expects a comment, bristles as he plucks the tumbler from her hand instead.

"See, I get everything you tell me, maybe not all the anthropology mumbo jumbo-" she frowns at this, "but all the important things I get. Still...what were we like? I mean..._really_," he says.

"Not like this," she tells him, not meeting his eyes. The words don't come out with any particular niceness or grace, but then, they don't ring very true either. "Very much like this," she says in her next breath, though truly she's lost.

"Superficially, we're very different people. I'm logical and you're...well, you're not, Booth. And I'm sure you don't find that a particularly offensive assessment, because it's true. Our therapists, Sweets, and Dr. Wyatt, found our dynamic fascinating. Only, I don't know what our dynamic was. Is," she corrects, and she's not good at this, but she would like to be. "_Is_," she repeats as she flicks her eyes to his.

He shifts on his feet, and she can hear the beginnings of her first name on his lips, soft and ultimately unsaid, as if he's finally caught on to the rhythm of how things unfailingly go between them. He leans forward. She knows now that she did wake him up; there's sleep in his eye. "Well, I'd like to get to that place again," he says gently. "And for that I need you, to help me…relearn our dynamic. I drive, you do your anthropology thing and that works for us, right?"

"Yes. Though that's putting it very basically."

"Well…basics first."

"You're not driving."

"Bones-"

"Okay. Yes…I'd like to help you with that," she says, and feels they're starting over. Wholly, completely, and she half expects him to proffer his hand so they can shake on this. "I'm an empiricist and _your _entire decision-making process is based around instinct, what you call gut feeling. But there has to be more than that. A dichotomy between rationalism and romanticism that isn't as rigid as I've always believed. Perhaps the two aren't mutually exclusive, but rather, engage in something akin to a facultative symbiosis, in much the same way you and I do professionally."

"Has everything got to boil down to science with you?" he asks, nose to nose with her now. And she believes the question is rhetorical. "We balance each other out. We have to, right? I mean, if we were this close-" and with this he leans, his skin tickling hers. "If we were this close then we weren't just two people...two people who work together."

"O...okay." She rolls the word around on her tongue, still tasting the brandy. "Okay," she concurs.

"Yeah?"

She smiles into their space. "Yeah."

He's different, she knows. Younger than her, in theory. She has valuable knowledge to impart.

He's shifting on his feet. She wonders if she makes him nervous or he senses he's standing too close to her, almost on top of her. "You know, thank you, Bones, for everything. For...not being able to relax," he breathes out on a quiet laugh, thumb moving through the dark and to her face. It slips, languid and lazy, along the unfamiliar line of her jaw. Slow, she feels him feel her throat work as she swallows, an air of anticipation settling to take hold of her reflexes and her muscles.

"Booth."

She blinks and he hesitates. She's not going to do this. She doesn't even know what it means to throw caution to the wind. He's a shadow in the dark, lips parting a little oddly, and the air between them seems to hum with something warm and unsaid, and she wants to remark again on how he needs air conditioning. The phrasing sounds snobby in her head, but then, her mind always borders on offensive and look at her body now too. She feels very obvious. To the roof of her mouth, her tongue is sticking.

"Don't," she says softly when he grabs for her cheek.

There's an emotion showing on his face, it registers as confusion as she watches him study her. Then lowly he begins to laugh. It's gentle, his eyes still dark. His tongue moves to wet his lip and maybe Brennan can't help but watch and wonder a little at that.

What has she done that's funny? And also, why would he want to kiss a stranger?

His thumb is still pressed into the small dip below her neck and he regards her now with a smile, as though he's finally figured all of her out, been let in on some quiet secret. Her gaze flickers away, in defiance of his stare, that search for some telling depth behind the whites of her eyes. There's really nothing there.

From the hallway, the light shines softly in, and in this instant she feels she's become painfully clear to him. Because that's what he does—he takes a person, lays them out under a microscope all his own, until there's nothing he can't discern, no cracks within her infrastructure he cannot catch. Her skin will always flush in exactly the same way for him and that chasm he finds between her head and her heart, the immeasurable gray between black and white, will always compute. And for him, knowing this, feeling her out, is almost a science.

His body straightens and leans, eyes not wavering. Forever seems to pass as they stand there. Forever is only a word. Booth doesn't say anything, doesn't try to capture her thoughts, or her lips or any part of Brennan's body that he's been privy to before, but pulls her warmly to his chest, knuckles brushing the tips of her hair as her bare feet come close to overlapping his. He covers her with his arms, so familiar the embrace slows her heart. She feels sleepy, suddenly.

And _this_, maybe this is only a guy hug, but she thinks it's what she needs.

More than that, it's what she wants.

(_You should go back to bed, _she breathes into his skin, flippantly almost. It may mean nothing at all.  
_Yeah, _he murmurs in reply_,_ fingers dipping into the hollow of her back. Her eyes close.  
It means something.  
And she wants, she wants, she wants...)

* * *

The following Thursday, after Max's science club, Parker stands in the doorway to her office, backpack hunching his shoulders.

"So, what if he never remembers?" he asks quietly. She'd hardly noticed he was there.

His feet don't touch the ground when he sits on her couch, and she knows this is harder for him than for anyone else. Booth tries not to make it that way, but inevitably it is.

"I'm sure he would still love you just as much as before, but you would have to accept that there are many things he won't remember," she says, placing a tentative hand atop the boy's shoulder. Because there's no bright side to this ending he's proposed.

And, has Rebecca already said all of this to him, she wonders. Whose territory is she infringing on?

"I would also have to accept that there are some things he may not remember," she concludes. And the words burn on their way up, her voice feeling thick in her throat. She contorts her face into something almost cheery, and false, and suddenly she understands why Booth allowed Parker to think that Africa included the country of Peru. She wants to say something nice, he's staring very intently up at her through his curls.

"Booth…I mean, your father, is going to be okay," she manages stiffly. "Everything turns out okay, in the end," she says, because he's only a child, and for the moment she believes that this is what Booth would want him to hear. And maybe, just a little bit, she believes what she's saying too.

There's this child beside her on the couch, colored marker stains across his fingertips, and something almost maternal stirs within her. "Cool, Bones," he says, a bit of a smile in his eyes, and she's almost certain this is the first time she's heard the word cool used in association with her name before, which is frighteningly new, but feels good too.

* * *

Ten weeks of nothing.

And it sounds terrible when she phrases it like that, but truly, he remembers nothing.

Brennan doesn't enjoy working with Perotta during the day and doesn't like Booth not remembering her at night. She fears she's failing, consistently pulling him up short, because there are progress markers he hasn't met and things he should already have remembered by now if this were truly temporary. If she were doing this correctly.

She's not. Nor are the doctors or anyone else, but she's _really_ not doing this right.

Her summer consists of human remains and his memory. And she'd give a great deal to understand them equally well.

Booth falls flawlessly back into the role of partner and friend, which bodes well for the FBI eventually reinstating their working relationship, but leaves her grasping for reasons as to why it's so absolutely pressing that he remember her, that he know what she means when she says _that one time in New Orleans_ or _that right turn in London_.

Sometimes she says callous little things like this on purpose. Because it's _hard_, really damn hard not to say things like this on accident, but sometimes, when he's uncaring or making her especially frustrated (and, yes, Booth is still very effective at doing that), it's something she can be certain will leave a sting in its wake. And that, she absolutely knows, is more terrible than him not remembering: the fact that she knows how to be cruel to him in that way.

She knows Booth very well.

(Though she knows how to say sorry very well now, too.)

Ten weeks out of the hospital, and they're leaving the diner on a Friday evening. He teases her about being familiar with the matinee symphony he had to suffer through on a field trip he helped chaperone for Parker's class.

He has time for fieldtrips with Parker, and lunch with her nearly every day now, which is new and probably good—though she can find ways to rationalize why it's not. This excess time isn't a bad thing, of that she's certain. But she simply can't make herself cheery about lunch dates and starting over the way that Angela can.

Brennan knows he's itching to have his gun, his car, and his life back. She can sympathize, finds it difficult to meet his eyes when it's her stepping into the driver's seat and not him. She never knew it could feel this way, that she could get something she's always wanted and not be happy with it. She would let him drive if she could. But he wants not an ounce of anything that borders on pity, especially from her. He's made that very clear—over and over and over again.

Tonight his laugh is genuine though, lost amid the murmur of traffic and people on the street. Brennan smiles as she starts to speak, the curve of her lips genuine, too. "_The Planets_ is a very masterful piece. I personally would have enjoyed seeing it played at the Kennedy Center."

"Uh huh. Of course you would have. It was scientifically correct and everything. No Pluto in it at all, Bones. Hadn't realized we lost a part of the solar system in the last six years. It took a bunch of eight year-olds to teach me that one."

"Pluto actually hadn't been discovered at the time Gustav Holst composed it." She pauses, watching a group of students, and Wendell, she thinks, step out of the Four Founders.

There's a sinking feeling she gets at the sight and she wavers, uncertain if choosing to run off with Booth and not pay those few months ago had been worthwhile or simply one of the stupidest things she's ever done. Because now they can never go back.

"But Jupiter…" she trails off, "I find Jupiter incredibly beautiful. Stylistically, it's rather unsophisticated and the chord progressions are repetitive, but it's celebratory and makes the act of listening an involved experience rather than a passive one. Not many songs can do that." Her cheeks tinge a bit in the darkness and she thinks he's about to laugh, but he doesn't. She carries on. "It's my favorite movement of the entire piece: Jupiter, Bringer of Jollity."

"Well, of course you like Jupiter…daffodil, daisy, Jupiter…" he says, then pauses at the look on her face. Her hand slips around his arm, and she turns him to face her in the middle of the sidewalk.

"I don't know what any of that means, Bones. You're gonna have to tell me what that means."

"Booth." She can feel her fingernails pressing half moons into the leather of his jacket. Maybe she's hurting him, scratching the material, but neither of them seem to notice or care. He's made her so happy, he truly doesn't know. "That's…those were my passwords."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah," she exhales. Her breath begins to loose its cadence, quick and uneven. He remembers something, and she smiles up at him. "What else can you remember? The circumstances…how exactly did I do that? Did hearing the word cause you to remember other associated ones, Booth?" She stares in his eyes, says the word _Pie_ three times over then heaves a small sigh. "No, that's too general."

He gives a good-natured laugh. "Bones, never doubt Seeley Booth. Just give it a little time and I'll remember everything about you. Even more than that."

"I don't see how that's possible. But I never doubted you," she says softly, almost offended by the insinuation as he pulls her fingers from his body and fits them in his own. He leads her toward the Four Founders, and she's so giddy that all she can do is laugh.

"We can't go there."

"Oh, _come on_...why not?"

"Booth, I've told you why." He gives her a look, and they stand there a moment, peering in through the window of their favorite bar. There's a low, sultry song that just reaches their ears, people clutching chilled beers, martini glasses that are sweating into their palms. It's a hot summer night, the sensuous kind where people press too close together and there's no mention of it because this is a city, where personal space will always overlap, where everyone touches someone else, somehow. Booth brushes against her, goading that they should go celebrate his Jupiter moment, and she concludes that he is right. She and Booth should be a part of this, this conglomeration of people partaking in social ritual, having involved experiences. They used to be a part of this. "One moment_,_" she whispers, and walks in, determined to share a drink with him, if anything.

Her partner follows her anyway, and she pushes through the people milling about, coming to a stop in front of the bar. The air is close, she feels intoxicated already, with the way that people seem so oblivious of her. She's not a part of their dramas, their problems, their dreams and nor are they a part of hers; she feels so light because of this. There's no sympathy, no blame—there's no one here to know her. Except for Booth, and so maybe they are complicit in this.

With purpose, she slides a fifty dollar bill over the slight stickiness at the bar, before Booth can see. A bartender looks up at her in question.

"I had drinks here once without paying, and for that I apologize," she admits to the young woman.

Before she gets a response, Booth kicks out a stool for her, and she smiles at the gesture, allowing him to pay for the drinks but then toasting…

"To you." Her voice is very solemn, and she isn't sure she knows how to give toasts that aren't. "May you eventually remember more than just my passwords."

His eyes crinkle a bit around the edges, and no more talk of his memory for the rest of the night, he makes her promise when his bottle clinks to hers. What will happen will happen, and for the moment she's almost inclined to agree. For so long she's refrained from becoming sentimental or nostalgic, but he takes a slow swig of beer and everything seems as it always was. As it should be.

This is the beer that he likes, this is the jacket he wears, and this is the way he's supposed to look at her. This, right here, is them. There's something about it so routine and familiar—the beer, their heads pushed together and a brazen hand to her hip, slipping briefly under her blazer. Something about the air is heady; the scent of the leather lingers under her nose like the faint smell of alcohol on their breath, all of this so thick and meaningful and utterly unchanged that if she were the type to close her eyes and remember she thinks she'd be sick.

"Alright there, Bones?" he asks, some of the laughter lingering from a story she's told about Hodgins, Mr. Nigel-Murray, and cubed cheese. "We could do it again, you know. Leave without paying, get our kicks doing something wrong, maybe chance getting arrested…if you want to," he says with a suggestive raise of his brow.

"Last time you said dining and dashing was about being bad in order to be good, not getting kicks."

His jaw tightens slightly. And as his body pushes closer to her own she can't help but feel she's made an incredible misstep.

"Well, I'm not sure if you know this, but I don't remember last time," he whispers from beside her.

"Yes, okay, but you still contradicted what you told me four months ago."

His beer bottle slides across the bar when he sets it down and she flinches as he stands. The scrape of her barstool breaks the subsequent quiet as she grabs for his arm, unsteady, standing too.

_Please don't go.  
_

"Booth, I don't…are we still going to-"

He starts to say something about needing to use the bathroom then shakes his head and simply stops, his mouth a hard thin line so it's incredibly clear to her that he's upset. "I get that I may have said that to you four months ago and that this is hard and you wish everything could be exactly the way it used to be. I wish that too, Bones. Especially for you. But that moment you're talking about is passed. It's already happened. And people create new ones. _We _create new moments. But you're making that pretty damn hard to do here," he says, softening considerably as her brow furrows in confusion.

"It's impossible to recreate one singular event, I know that," she replies as she pushes him gently back onto the stool, mind searching for the correct thing to say. Her bottom lip trembles the slightest bit, chapped by the humidity, and she thinks it might make it all the more conspicuous, all the more telling to him to pull it safely between her teeth. The threat of him leaving hovers still and kicks her brain into overdrive with a sort of desperation she can't quite comprehend. When everything became so fragile, she doesn't know, because never has she felt truly worried he'd walk away. Not ever. Brennan presses her hand to his shoulder.

"I think this could be a moment, the type you mean, right? This is a moment?" Her voice feels roughened by the beer that's dried her throat, by the unspoken _I'm sorry_. Because she is, though she doesn't know why. "I don't know what you were implying, but fine, we never have to do anything remotely similar to dining and dashing ever again. Though you seemed to think that us being bad could be very good at the time," she says.

Booth gives her a sideways glance over the mouth of his beer. "I'm sure I did."

His words disconcert her. It's the way he says them. No joke or innuendo—there's weight there. And regret.

"What do you think?" he asks, leaning in conspiratorially toward the bartender as Brennan sits. "Should I settle the tab for Miss American Pie over here?"

"You really have no say in the matter," Brennan replies, leveling him with her gaze. The blatant reference to earlier hurts and she pushes the bottle away; it's only her second drink and she had no plans of finishing, she tells him. Only her second, so he has no reason to be looking at her like she's some sort of lush.

He presses his fingers to the side of her beer and moves it back in her direction, bumping a warm shoulder to hers as she hears his breath settle in the space beside her ear.

"Bones, look at me."

Her eyes have begun to sting, the night feeling almost tainted and over, but she turns to face him all the same. "Do you swear that Hodgins didn't just tell you the passwords?"

"Hey, of course I swear." His palm touches her hot cheek: the drink, the crowded room, his skin, making her skin burn at the contact. She wishes she knew a way to remain upset with him; he's so close.

This isn't new. There's some intangible draw here, to having to lean like this to have his words reach her ear, the movement instinctual like a moth to a flame. She likes them like this, she's long decided; alone, anonymous, touching. It's something akin to being undercover, and she feels like she could be dangerous.

"Bones, of course," he reassures once more. "I would never lie about something like that."

A meter away, the bartender murmurs what sounds like _that's so sweet_ and Brennan blinks then pulls back with a halfhearted sort of smile. Booth looks a little unnerved, and she feels that way, too.

"Come on, you should have known I would never have done that to you," he says, voice verging on disappointment.

"I know." And in the near darkness her fingers slip under his chin, lips pressing a quiet kiss to the arch of his zygomatic. "Thank you," she whispers.

* * *

Summer along the eastern seaboard is wet this year. When Booth and Brennan leave the Four Founders it's already raining, but there's none of that new smell anymore, as there is with spring showers, where the air and soil take on the same strange scent. It's been off and on for weeks now, and the current situation is a sticky cocktail of raindrops and smog. She and Booth watch the lightning from the window of a cab, attempting to avoid laughter as their driver becomes jittery. _Bad luck_, he says, very ominous and maybe only for their entertainment. They're red-cheeked and fumbling and maybe he thinks they're anxious for sex, that Booth's hand is already pressing her leg in the darkness. It isn't.

And, isn't it funny that the power is out on a night like this? Whatever the reason why, they're seeing their way to her door in darkness, Booth sinking his fingers into her side despite her protests that she can maneuver on her own. They're both going about this blindly, should it matter who leads?

She's quick with her keys and the lock, and once inside Booth lights a candle. Soon there's a pinprick of light in her kitchen, a sweet smell of something citrus. She can see only his face. "Hi," he says, voice making the flame wave.

She laughs. "Hi."

She crosses the room to see more clearly, a disquieting glint in her eye as her fingers fold under the flaps of his jacket. She's at his chest and he at her face, pulling her nearer, urging her body against his, and she doesn't pull back. Unseen to her—the candle's warmth doesn't extend quite so far—he lifts his fingers, skims across her skin, fervent and unstudied; the base of her neck, the wet bridge of her nose, the faint indent of cheekbone. The fact of him learning her in this manner, a quiet trail across her face, feels strangely penetrating, personal. Against her forehead, he lays his knuckles, as though she were sick, as though he might gauge her in this way. It's a frightening moment, for all its shortness, for all its intensity.

He's hardly breathing.

"Very symmetrical," he says, and she wants, inexplicably, to fall a little closer, to laugh. But she can't, she won't, it would ruin this.

"As are you," is her reply, in the dark and still at his fingertips.

Later, their clothes having dried, they lay in her bedroom. Rich people and their impractical pillows, he jokes, stacking the useless ones at the foot of the bed, a flashlight in his hand. She rustles around in her bedside drawer for something of interest, its contents all hard edges and incredibly dull. A notepad, a pen, her passport, her gun. A stack of business cards, a glass dolphin. Brainy smurf.

"The worst gift you ever gave me," she says with all the seriousness she can muster, pressing the figurine into his palm. He clasps down before she can pull away, hand wrapping loosely around her own and trapping the smurf between. Mostly it's amusing, but she thinks there's something odd, intimate, about it, a sense between the both of them that a sentiment is being conveyed. She should let go, she feels it pressing into her hand.

"Really?" he whispers, the flashlight on her face. The luminescence turns yellow on the wall, bounces back into his eyes. She blinks, covering the light with a curve of her palm, an orange glow creeping through her skin. She feels translucent and on fire.

After some consideration, she answers, "No," and clicks the flashlight off.

They are sleepy and still in the humidity, her hair feeling knotted and thick against her neck. There's the faint whir of the air conditioning trying to kick on. But a sudden flash of lightning lays any hope of this to rest.

He's smiling, she thinks, forehead tipping toward her own, and they're silent for a long time. Everything outside is disturbing and loud and she's thankful for these four walls. She shuts her eyes, counting seconds. The storm is four miles away.

"I loved you, didn't I?" he whispers, a roll of thunder obscuring the questioning _didn't I?_ Brennan feels his fingers climb across her skin, dewy still and warm, they pause beside her lips, a small punctuation on her face. She wonders if he can feel the heat on her skin, if he wants to taste it. Her eyes remain shut, her mouth quiet and unsmiling. They both know she isn't asleep, but this is the easiest defense.

"This is weird for you. Okay," he breathes, just audible. Fingers move nearer to her lips, then on them—only briefly. They slick away and he rolls over. Brennan remains perfectly still.

Do you remember me at all, she wants to ask. Even just a little. Midnight, once, at the Lincoln Memorial. Flowers at my mother's grave. Hugging on the court steps.

How nice it might be to turn over in the dark, the rain still at her window, and there's an urge, suddenly, to press her knees into the backs of his. To see how they fit. How nice, she thinks, and how she'd like to.

"Booth?" she asks, into the silent room.

No reply.

He must be asleep.

Her hands fold quietly over her stomach. She won't do anything rash.

* * *

Hypnosis has done nothing to improve the state of his memory, which is fine. They should accept that and move on. Try other methods. She doesn't understand why she and Booth should have to spend their hour in therapy discussing his supposed lack of openness to experimental methods in memory retrieval.

She's studying the slow ticks on her wristwatch when she hears Booth give a quick _Quack! _in the middle of Sweets' prattling. A half laugh comes out before she stops herself.

"I'm not a quack, Agent Booth. I'm not sure what Dr. Brennan has been telling you but…"

"Clearly, the quack was a harkening back to an anecdote I told about you imprinting on us in a way similar to baby ducks. The title of doctor is probably unfitting in the field of psychology, but not enough to warrant calling you a quack."

"You know," Booth tells her, "I think Freud would have something to say about Sweets thinking _we_ think he is a bad shrink."

"Perhaps he would."

"Repressed thoughts, Sweets?"

"Suppressed thoughts."

"What's the difference?"

"Really, I'm not certain Freud knew. Hypothetically, if it were at all proven that people can willfully banish conscious-"

"Real cute, guys."

"Ah, you know we like you, Sweets," Booth says, though the words themselves sound skeptical. He looks to Brennan. "We did, right?"

"At times." Her palm folds under her chin and she obscures her smile with her fingers. From the corner of his eye Booth sees and they share a knowing look, their eyes glinting as though they really are the children their therapist purports them to be.

Maybe they are. Just a tiny bit.

Sweets dismisses them as a matter of course and they bounce off the couch and bound down the hallways of the Bureau. Today, Booth promises her an evening of discussing the events surrounding the Epps murders in exchange for allowing him to look over the files of a dead-end case she's working. Despite the stipulations of the trade, she thinks he might truly be sick of everyone bombarding him with their memories. Especially her.

When Booth makes a quick stop at his office, Sweets appears suddenly at her aside, asking for a quick word.

"Dr. Brennan," he whispers, quite serious, but practically cowering as she glares. "I think it could be, uh…counterintuitive for you to continue making the act of remembering the entire basis of your interaction with Booth. Ever since he..."

"Lost his memory?"

"Yes. Booth, has…well, how do I put this? You need to lay off a little."

"Lay off?"

"It's a colloquialism, Dr. Brennan."

"I know what it means."

"Yes, well, I believe that it might be beneficial to allow him to know you in other ways."

"Physical, you mean?"

"No…ummm, _wow_, you should consider why your mind automatically jumped to that."

"I have no control over the rate at which his memories return or whether they return at all. But, in documented cases, those who had the quickest and most complete recoveries also had a high volume of implanted memories."

Sweets stares at her a moment too long for her liking, as though she's the most curious lab rat he's ever seen. She's long since realized that with Booth she's becoming out of her depth. Doesn't need their therapist to tell her that, too.

"He thinks you're lying about the extent of your relationship prior to the surgery," he mutters.

She rolls her eyes. Really _rolls_ them. She's certain Sweets will make this an epic chapter in his book. "I don't believe you're at liberty to tell me that," she says, the old standard of doctor-patient confidentiality seeming to have been thrown out the window. Booth would hit him if he were hearing this with his own ears.

"You wanna know what I think, Dr. Brennan?"

"Not particularly, no."

"I think you've totally made him more infatuated with you now than he ever was before."

"That's not even psychology, it's pure conjecture. Infatuation implies foolishness and a lack of reason."

"And _you_ believe the same can be said for love?"

She's left a little stunned, for a moment rendered silent.

She hasn't any clever responses.

Brennan remembers the ink blots after her parent's disappearance. Insurance is a mess when you haven't any dead bodies, she'd said to her brother, and he'd promptly decided that there was a screw loose in her head. Or rather, one tightened to extremes. The logistics of things, of grief, scare Russ to this day. In the end though, the school shrink she'd had to see was amusing. All people who think they can read minds are. Rorschach tests were still widely in use, and _okay, temperance_, he'd say, producing a yellowed piece of cardstock.

_Okay._

It was the word she spoke most. Okay. And people believed she was.

You see a dead man—you're traumatized.

A butterfly—well adjusted. Or maybe only flighty.

A blot of colored ink—you're not looking hard enough.

She never looked very hard. There are aspects of her life where she's always allowed herself to slack off.

Maybe what she was meant to learn is that everything is abstract, only what you make of it. All matters with psychologists are like a sophomoric debate about subjectivity, something she imagines her grad students arguing about after too many beers. What does Brennan believe? She believes that love is manmade. Not naturally occurring, and, therefore, no more real or fake than pluots, than plastic. It doesn't mean people like to live without it.

"You already believe my answer to that would be yes," she says with a practiced air of nonchalance, "though I'm sure you wouldn't concur and would find some other juvenile twist on words that would-"

"Bones is right, let's go," Booth says quickly, with a clap to Sweets' back as he exits his office.

"Of course I'm right."

"You heard us?"

Booth laughs. "Kid, it's Bones…she's always right."

"Yeah, well you often allowed her to be…" she hears as her back turns. She worries Booth does, too. Though she isn't sure why.

Deep down, she believes, that's really what she wants. For Booth to remember things like allowing her, always, to be the smart one. Isn't that something akin to love?

Really, there are too many ways for this to end badly, too many outcomes beyond the realm of planning. In the car, she tells Booth he once threw knives as an undercover circus act, managed to hit everything but her.

"No way you should be _this_ excited about a story like _that_."

"You would have had to have been there. Uncertainty, on occasion, can be very exhilarating."

"Yeah, you keep telling yourself that, Bones."

And she does.


	3. Chapter 3

Kudos to you if you've gotten this far in one sitting. Um...let's see, I think that parts of this section didn't format the way I would have liked, so a more aesthetically pleasing version can be found on my LJ, in case that's what you want. :D

* * *

**Title:** Older Chests (3/4)  
**Author: **ama_blue

Even after these three months, his mind is a mystery to him. He's the same and he's not. Perhaps it isn't so much an actual paradox as much as one she's created to explain the tiny ways in which he has changed. Most people say he's very much the same, but she detects the differences. They're minute enough to bother her.

He remembers certain things, all of them very small. He recognizes her mother's earrings, presses one between his finger and thumb for just a moment as he breathes out against her ear. _New Orleans?_ he says and she feels his smile split against her ear, which makes her blood pulse a little quicker. Her body is becoming predictable in this way; most days she prefers that he not touch her at all. But, how difficult that proves to be, how hard it is for her to stay away, to push away, to make sense of her failed attempts at evasion. He's on to her, the way he always was before, and she wishes he weren't the only one who knew how to cut to the very heart of things.

After her earring, Booth finds her jewelry somehow fascinating; the look or the feel of it or the way it makes him remember, though he never actually says. He doesn't have to, and sometimes she plays with the pendant at the base of her neck or fingers the cool row of stones against her skin in the hope that he won't be able to help himself and what his eyes compel him to ask—when she wore it last and was he there when she did? Yes or no, she's always needing to tell him more.

His neurologist says to give him time. It's space she worries she's forgotten how to give.

Booth meets Agent Perotta on the day he comes back to work, the day his brother comes back to town. He has heard enough of Brennan's complaining to know that Perotta's no one terribly special, no one terribly intelligent. But Brennan can't help but fume a little when he recalls something inconsequential about an interrogation room, Perotta asking him about his workout routine. Because it is consequential, remembering is rare and Perotta smiles very prettily for him in response. Her voice is quiet before she goes, lips puckering to press a quick kiss to his cheek. "Good luck, Seeley."

Brennan supposes that is the right thing to say because Booth believes in luck. Beginner's luck—like remembering something about a person the moment you've re-met them.

"That was impressive," Brennan says later, after a quiet ride in his car, her voice so forcefully light that she's practically trilling. She looks up from the charred remains her body is bent over. "An entire memory. Not just words, but an entire memory. That's very good."

Booth barely catches her expression before he's giving orders to the techs photographing the scene. "Maybe I'd believe you if you weren't scowling at me," he says.

"I'm not scowling. Agent Perotta is young, relatively intelligent, blonde, has a nearly ideal waist to hip ratio, evenly spaced orbits, and-"

"I get it, Bones, she's hot."

There. That's all he needed to say.

Slowly, her fingers run the tops of the victim's teeth. He was young, she thinks; no occlusal wear to the third molar at all. Booth winces at the smell and she turns what's left of the skull for a closer look. "Male, aged 17 to 25. Wormian bones along the cranium suggest Asian or Hispanic descent…Booth, you're supposed to tell them to pack the body up and bring it to the Jeffersonian."

He does exactly this and she continues with the previous thread of conversation. Unable, somehow, to let it go. "I simply brought up the topic of Agent Perotta because she's expressed interest in you in the past, and I assume it's been a number of months since you've been involved sexually with-"

"Unbelievable…" he breathes, hands at his hips now and her own skin is flushing suddenly. It's August and the heat is sweltering—this is the reasoning she's reaching for—and she can only stare as he stalks over to her. A hand to her forearm, he pulls her out of earshot of the techs, her gloves covered in ash and brushing against his jacket without him seeming to notice or care.

"What exactly do you-"

"Were you always this frustrating?" he cuts her off in a hushed tone too loud, the both of them settling in a deserted clearing. The cover of trees shields their bodies but not the sound of his voice. This is unprofessional. She stares at a button on his shirt. "Is that really what you think I should do, Bones…sleep with Perotta?" he asks softly.

She feels his knee knock against her own, the both of them hardly blinking as he encroaches on her space. He's less than intimidating to her and maybe he'll understand that now, but she feels bark scrape the fabric of her clothing as her back presses against a tree, toes touching his at a clumsy angle. She always says what she means, but she didn't actually mean-

Truthfully, she's never wanted him to have sex with anyone else. Not Tess, not Cam, not anyone blonde and only relatively intelligent. And does that make her jealous by default? The thought itself is archaic, primal, and she brings her teeth over her bottom lip in frustration.

Slowly, she snaps off her gloves, her skin needing to breathe. Her ankle itches as well, and she looks absently down at it as his breath brushes her face.

"I want the past three months to have been worthwhile. For you to remember me and not find me difficult to be around," she says honestly, more calmly than she feels. She still won't meet his gaze.

"Bones-" he says, the name strung into syllables as he speaks. Stifled, she feels her eyes lift a fraction in surrender, her name, muffled near her cheek, stirring some desire for him to touch her, if only so she could have reason to push him away, to believe as she once did that he will always be too warm and condescending and caring to be believed.

He pushes the issue, pushes himself against her and his palm against her cheek because he isn't going to move and neither is she. Maybe there's something wrong with the both of them; maybe secretly she finds this fun. Again, she feels like the tree in the woods, and maybe he's the wind, wanting to shake her of her leaves. Or maybe just to shake her. She knows that he won't and somehow that isn't reassuring to her anymore. Why is she thinking in metaphors?

Say something, she wants to tell him. Or, have sexual intercourse with whomever you like. Or, maybe, don't look at me like this.

Confusion comes and doesn't go, steady, unrelenting, and she feels water begin to prickle at the corners of her eyes. Her dirty fingers amble over his jacket flaps. She makes herself stop. "There's a dead boy in that field over there, don't you care?" she whispers. He used to care. He lets out a low huff as the sun begins to get in her eyes; they're growing wet and she blinks against the brightness. Booth doesn't back away, even as she presses a halfhearted shove to his chest, and maybe she's grateful for the understanding it takes to be him, to put up with her because she's sure she's more difficult than people actually bother to tell her.

She doesn't know what she's doing anymore, and that's all that there is. "I find myself frustrating, too," she breathes, gumboots shifting to depress in the soil under her feet.

And still, he says nothing. Her hands wring the gloves tightly, until she feels them coil and stretch beneath her palms, sweaty now and coated almost entirely in ash. "I suppose it isn't any of my business what you do."

* * *

That night she walks into the Four Founders and Jared raises his drink upon seeing her. She's insulted him and pushed him off of a bar stool before in this very establishment, so maybe he knows this meeting can't possibly go more poorly than their previous ones.

"I need you to talk to him," she says without missing a beat.

"Hello to you, too," is his response as she settles across the table from him. He's tanner, not quite so sulky, and apparently he never bothered to come back until now. India clearly agreed with him.

"Look, Tempe," he says, vowels drawn out with a smile and slurred. "I already have."

"Booth remembers almost nothing. You must have gathered at least that from interacting with him today."

"I can't force him to remember. You're the smart one here, you should know that. And maybe you've forgotten this, but seven years ago he liked me a whole lot more than he does now."

"Six years ago. It's six years that he cannot remember. And he's come to respect you more, at the very least. I think it would be best for you to actually sit down and tell him _everything_ he's forgotten that you can remember." Jared raises a brow at this and she snatches whatever it is that he's drinking from his hands, unamused. "Because, for you, talking clearly equates to telling him about a time the two of you got drinks together followed by an elaborate account of how you lost your job in order to save his life."

"That's pretty harsh." He frowns a little before chuckling, carefree, as if all of this will wear away like a hangover tomorrow morning. There's a fine line between carefree and careless; Brennan doesn't think twice before placing his half-full glass onto the tray of a waitress walking by. He smirks but goes on. "I mean, you know how things go between me and Seel. It's not going to change because he only remembers thirty of the thirty-five years he's been my big brother."

"Jared, if you don't tell him things—"

"He won't remember I've acted like kind of an ass?" He shrugs, and all she can do is watch him, utterly lost as to how someone like this can share half of his genes with _her_ Booth. Booth would never…he is not actually _her_ Booth. But it's semantics, simply put: necessary differentiation when there's another Booth in her presence.

One who's reaching for her hand as she pulls it away, his eyes too cloudy for her to detect any familiar sort of brown there. But the smirk's gone. He sighs. "Look, it's you he wants to remember, baby, not me. Besides, from the sounds of it, you've done enough talking for the both of us."

Her eyes roll in response but her insides are churning. Booth was right, Jared can become quite…hateful when he's got a couple of drinks in him.

"Booth told you that?"

"What is this, high school?"

"You're referring to your being intoxicated in public, right?" He shakes his head and clears his throat; she lets out a breath, knowing this is pointless.

The truth is this: Jared is quite capable of making Booth angry. Has done so on numerous occasions. She had hoped having to relive some of these moments might have drawn out some memory, some emotion that she's been unsuccessful at eliciting thusfar. Those are things she can cling to—the memories he can recall, and just one would have made her happy. Just one. Booth says she looks at him like he's one of her bones and to stop, _just stop_, because more often than not it only creeps him out. But some problems she can't let go of until they've been solved, and Booth is no ordinary person, no ordinary puzzle.

"Do you possess even the slightest bit of self-control?" she whispers as Jared stands for another drink. Before he can respond, she's walked away, though she hears him, hot on her heels, as she pushes open the door, stepping onto the sidewalk. He wraps his palm around her arm, and she can feel it, there's strength there, but not enough. He stumbles when she pushes him away.

"Look, you've got that whole genius thing down, but he needs time for his mind to catch up," he says, raising his hands, as if to gain her trust. He gives a small exasperated sigh, face inching closer to hers. "After saving my brother's life, and making him fall for you twice, you can only do so much, you know? You can't fix everything."

"I don't know what you're talking about. I didn't save anyone's life," she says confusedly, just before his lips hover close then press to hers, mouth slightly wet and _wrong_. It surprises her, her cheeks tingeing with anger and perhaps a little embarrassment at the months that have spanned since someone kissed her last. Because this last person was him. And at that, the anger envelops any shame, her arms stretching to shove him quickly away, the memory of November—because _she remembers_—hitting squarely at her chest as she feels her betrayal begin to run deeper. She shoves Jared's shoulder again for good measure, averting her eyes.

Today, the past few months, have composed themselves into one messy fit of misstep after misstep. For her they pile up without a second's notice and Jared's just another. A symmetrical face and lips that feel like a mistake. She fumbles with the question of when simple biology became a question of morality, of right and wrong, for her; she's beholden to no one and, in a way, that fact stings even more.

She almost asks Jared to explain himself, too,but doesn't bother. Any answer, any excuse, would only go to assuage her own lingering guilt. And it stems all the way back to the months she worked alongside Booth, brushing off every hallucination and sign that so clearly told her something was wrong.

He was slowly dying, and why in all her seemingly infinite knowledge couldn't she recognize that? There's something finite to this touch-and-go rhythm she and Booth have got, where he goes on faith in her and she goes on faith in the past. It will never sustain.

"I miss him," Brennan whispers thickly, wiping the taste of Jared from her mouth.

"Yeah, I think he realized that a long time ago."

Jared watches her hand move from her lips, looks down at it, almost dazedly, then goes on. "Look, I don't know why I…" he trails off. He's not going to elaborate, and she wants to feel angrier. She wants to redeem herself somehow, too; to push her lips against some stranger's and be glad that it means nothing at all.

"Look," Jared says, wiping his palms along the leg of jeans, "Seeley's pretty much got a heart of glass. So don't, you know…hurt him. He's not confident about a whole lot right now."

Awkwardness settles. She doesn't know how to reply. Really, she's never known how to act around Jared. The only common factor here is Booth.

"That's an uncharacteristically caring thing to say, I think. On your brother's behalf…even it's from a popular song from the 1980's." He looks curiously at her, but _Heart of Glass_ was a song, she knows. _Blondies_ sang it.

"I would never hurt Booth," she says, and swallows to let the mere suggestion pass from thought. She would _never_ purposely hurt Booth. "And you should try not to either."

He nods and she returns the gesture. It feels like an understanding, and really he's the only family Booth has got, so she'd like to think that's what they have.

* * *

Her watch reads ten-o'clock; the ticking seems loud in her ear and she hears it, she thinks, because all is quiet. Time lulls and rolls slowly as if in competing rhythm with the wheels of her car, and she's not sure she's ever felt more stagnant, more desperate for _something, anything_ to happen.

And maybe it's only one evening alone. Maybe they'll go to work tomorrow and there will be no tension there at all. Maybe she doesn't have to see him every single day.

But she'd like to.

Brennan leaves Jared and the bar and ends up at Booth's door with little thought as to why. Isn't it enough to want to see him, to want to fix things between them? She thinks that it is, and her knock is loud against his door. She doesn't knock harder as she grows impatient, doesn't shout _It's Bones_ as she's done before. She simply waits, watches his body lean against the paneling as he lets her in. He's out of his suit, clad in a T-shirt and jeans, and his feet look so comfortably bare that she slips off her own shoes, wonders if this means that she's staying.

"You should look through your peephole before answering the door," she warns for lack of something better to say. But if she were a burglar he'd be able to take her, he murmurs with a smirk, because really she's more easily caught than she thinks.

Oh. She laughs a little too. It's funny.

(It's frightening.)

She follows him into his living room, stands as he sits. "I did this sometimes. I would come over and usually I would call. But sometimes I wouldn't."

"You don't have to explain. You're welcome here anytime you like." He flicks his gaze to her, a disarming smile, and she breathes a needed sigh of relief.

It's quiet here, too, uncharacteristically so, and she's become accustomed to the low hum of the television or his record player, hearing something in her ear that isn't just his voice. White noise—that's what it's called, and now she can hear his heels drag across the hardwood before he props them on the coffee table.

Her eyes narrow to see the book lying on his couch. He says some joke about her squint-like behavior and she pushes his legs aside before settling companionably beside him. He doesn't stop her as she snatches up the paperback, only chuckles a little as she realizes it's one of hers.

"You thought I wouldn't see that you dedicated a book to me? I think Andy Lister's got staying power."

"I've told you that before. About having dedicated a book to you."

"No you haven't." He gives her a look that says _you're clearly wrong_, she gives one that says _I'm clearly right_, "And Jesus, Bones, I haven't got anterograde amnesia, too. I think I would have remembered _that_ if you had told me."

"David, who I was seeing at the time, thought I dedicated the book to you because you saved my life."

"And you didn't?"

"There was, perhaps, some sense of indebtedness there. But also…well, there isn't anything necessarily wrong with leading a mostly solitary existence. I used to say that being alone didn't mean I was lonely. That probably wasn't the case." There's a pause and she corrects herself. "It wasn't the case. Anthropology exists because as humans we have an innate desire to understand ourselves in relation to others. Before Angela, before you…"

She's utterly incoherent, she knows. He's watching her so carefully, and she needs to phrase this the correct way. "Well, here I am on a Tuesday night, Booth, trying to understand _you_ and not a skeleton in Limbo. I'm not certain that's a good thing, but I'm changed in that way, I believe. Not more human, simply more…amenable to visceral experiences." He smiles and she clarifies. "Visceral meaning any and all attempts on my part to connect on more than an intellectual level."

He gives her a lopsided grin. "So, uh, what you're saying is that _this_, knowing me, has been a visceral experience for you."

She laughs, and if she were accustomed to blushing at mere words, the suggestion, uncharacteristic for him, would be enough to make the color rise in her cheeks. "Don't make fun of me," she sighs.

Booth moves down the couch until the sides of their bodies are flush, tucks a stray piece of her hair back behind her ear. His gaze fixes briefly on her mouth, and she allows her eyes to linger longer on his, silently daring him to say something, do _something_, before he falters and pulls his gaze away. Her own nerve has all but evaporated and her tongue rolls along her lip a little impatiently, the back of his hand skimming across the paleness at her cheek. She wishes this weren't becoming habit and a terribly normal occurrence, because then it might mean something. As it stands, her face and the skin he finds so categorically hot or cold at her cheeks may simply be a novelty and maybe she's come to find his hands too familiar to object to, because who else would she possibly expect to touch her in this way?

"What are you doing?" she says tersely, because she wants to comprehend.

"Bones, I'm just...I'm really glad you came over. Honestly. Sometimes you make me insane, but in a way, you know, you keep me from that," he says, so serious and sincere that she wishes she knew why.

Her nose wrinkles. "So you're saying I keep you from going insane by making you insane?"

"Never mind," he answers in frustration, fingers falling away from her face.

"No, I want to know," she says honestly, pushing back toward him on the couch, as though closeness were a particular necessity. He halts her, hands folding over her shoulders and it hits her quite suddenly that she must be very pretty to him. It's so strange, yet not strange at all, and maybe a part of her should feel she's being a bit presumptuous and conceited, but why else might he look at her so often and in this way? _Temperance_, he says kindly, and her nose wrinkles further at the name; but then, she likes it a little, the way he must like her lips a little and how her hair falls soft and wisp-like a little against the very edge of her cheek. She feels like she's distracting him.

"The point is," he says very quietly, as though someone else might hear, "I'm glad you're here."

"I had no actual reason, no purpose for coming to see you."

"No reason necessary. I told you." Her back reclines against the armrest, legs splayed out in such a way as to give Booth nowhere to sit but that sliver of couch beside her body. She watches as he moves toward her face, chest hovering closely above her own. She thinks she'd be miserable if she were never this near to him again.

"I am going to remember eventually, Bones. People get holes in their heads, holes in their hearts, all of the time. But they heal. Things break, but I'm pretty damn good at putting them back together," he says, more forcefully, she thinks, than he actually feels.

"A hole through your heart would leave you dead."

"You know what I mean, Bones. Don't act like you don't. Not about this," he says defiantly, and his face turns angry for one quiet moment.

"Booth, you aren't capable of making promises like that."

"Well, I just did." He gives a halfhearted smile, shooting her a sideway glance, and she knows that she's won this argument. Whatever that's worth.

"I want you to remember, Booth, but we can't be certain that you will." She leans up to look at him, straightening her back to make their faces level. "And even if you do, even if you do…you used to know me _very well_."

"I know who you are, Bones," he says, as though there could be no more obvious statement of fact for him to make. She thinks, as he chuckles a little, low, five fingers entwining with hers, that he may be right. The movement is shy—she laughs a little to clear her head. "You have twenty-seven bones in your hand. I know that," he says.

She nods, almost proud of this tiny gem of osteological knowledge. "So do you."

"That's why we're partners. It's gotta be," he says lightly, and he smiles, genuinely, slow, so a corresponding shiver threads the length of her spine. She bites her lip, wills it away, and only trembles a little bit more, feels her face burn a little bit more, in her attempt. This may never go away, and _Bones_ she sees him mouth in the midst of her confusion, face softening into that expression that's unsettling in that way that tells her he finds her endearing or naive or something special, and she wishes there were something more erotic to find in these moments. He twists a piece of her hair along his finger and she presses a hand to his chest, missing the usual buttons on his shirts. This one is a little worn, a corny decal across the front. She rolls her eyes.

"I believe it's because we complement each other," she says playing into the game. If that's what this is.

"Then let me compliment you, Bones," he intones, in her ear, and she lets his forehead touch to hers. Okay. His hand falls away from her hair, and for a fleeting instant her lips turn against it before she bites down upon them, his fingers falling down to graze her arm, thumb pressing softly to the scar tissue he finds there. He's gentle, so polite; she doesn't think he'll ever really touch her. "Your humerus, this is where you got hit by that bullet on my birthday. Remind me again why I let you go into the field."

"You need me, without my expertise-"

His thumb pushes lightly, once more, to her skin before he pulls away. "Let me do the talking tonight, okay?" he says seriously.

Brennan opens her mouth to speak before he quiets her, hand halting over her heart to curve just over the top of her breast. "I got you to tell a jury about your past, about why you became a forensic anthropologist. You got me to incriminate you on that same witness stand. We even?"

He doesn't wait for her answer.

"So never do that again. I-If you plan something that involves me, then involve me, Bones. Don't keep me out of the loop, okay?" he asks, tone bordering on serious now as his hand slides from her chest to overlap her hand. There's a warm simplicity to the movement and her pulse quickens under his palm, and for a moment she worries for the state of his line, fears the shatter of all things platonic, because in its own way, at a time and a place, it truly was once ideal. It kept her numb to this. This, which is romantic the way things always might have been before, when things were stagnant and never quite sensual, never anything beyond tactile; his touch lingers a little too long, and _yes_, she almost breathes. All of this has come to be okay. She needs for everything to be okay.

Her fingers push into his hair, pulling, and provoking and she feels like she's doing something right.

"Maybe I deserved it, but you shouldn't punch me either. My skull is hard and you'll only end up hurting yourself," he murmurs from above her. She doesn't want to talk about anything from before. She feels apathetic toward the memories, suddenly.

He goes on, mouth to her skin, and in a way, she can't stand the way she hangs on each and every word he husks in her ear. She should never have come here. She would have been perfectly happy to have night all to herself.

"Radius, ulna, carpals," he traces, she tries to make her face a shade more blank. She blinks. "You cuff 'em, I shoot 'em, right?" he asks softly, a little bit of a smile in his eyes.

"This isn't funny," she manages, words dissolving with her lips into the line of his shoulder. His hip pushes against her own, at a certain point, as she feels him shift and their breath begin to mingle, hot like his hand. A distinct sense of loss blossoms, spreads, touching her every bit as much as he is, because these are her memories, they're not his. And he's going to make her cry, she knows.

"You're right, it isn't," he breathes, almost, into her hair.

"You are so…" she murmurs, pulling back and shaking her head. "So…annoying," she chokes out, fingernails scraping into the denim at his knee.

"Well, I'm sorry about that, Bones," he says, voice edging on sarcastic, and biting and he tries to tip her chin up to look at him.

"Stop trying to be charming." Her hand pushes his away. She begins to stand, and he halts her, pressing down on her shoulder with a little force and then letting go when she looks up at him, her eyes narrowed and, "How would you like it if I one day woke up with absolutely no clue of who you are?" she asks him.

He turns around and away from her. "I don't think that's possible, Bones. But I will always like you."

"I shouldn't have said that," she says honestly. Her hand reaches down the couch for his; it's the only effort she knows how to make in apology.

"You put people back together. Piece by piece, and to see that, how much you care, your metacarpals…phalanges. I do know you, Bones," he says, still not looking at her entirely, but gathering her hand into his. He lays kisses to her knuckles in quick succession, lips blazing a grateful trail along the back of her hand.

With equal quickness, her face lowers, pressing away and into her chest. Her eyes have begun to well with tears, and she feels like he's being pretty damn poetic and forgiving and loving right now, so she doesn't want to cry because of that. She feels his eyes concentrated on her, and the gentle roll of tears, wet and unwanted, on her cheeks now as all that he's said hits her squarely in the stomach, too familiar, too much, like some painful refrain and she doesn't understand how she can still miss someone who's right here before her.

"Hey, don't close your eyes. Don't cry." His thumb runs along her cheek, tracing the tears he finds before slipping back into her hair. "I'm not worth all that."

She shakes her head, words catching momentarily in her throat as she feels his lips smooth the skin beneath her lashes, tears clinging tenuously to his mouth. _Oh god. _"Booth-" she breathes out, ragged, as she wipes relentlessly at the smears across her cheek. "You would know that I thought you were. That I think you are."

She leans up, tentatively, and it isn't until she presses a chaste kiss along the line of his jaw that it occurs to her he's finally stopped speaking. Stopped naming her bones. Mandible. Maxilla. Zygomatics. "Your frontal bone," she whispers, her lips at his forehead and she feels herself go fluid with heat and with memory, because they're looking and touching and pressing mouths to bare skin and she thinks that this requires a bravery that had fallen by the wayside before. She pulls away. She knows him, the way he knows the back of her hand, the way she knows the palm of his; it's a truth she holds tightly to because she doesn't know his mind. Her own head is swimming, pragmatic and rational and unfailingly in conflict with every feeling coursing through her.

And that, mostly, is what surprises, what catches her off her guard: the feel of this.

He shifts until his entire body hovers over her own, and he's watching tears line her face, unchecked, for the first time in an incredibly long time. He smiles as they move nearer on the tight space of his couch, her arms pulling his chest to hers. So close he's covering her. The heels of her hands press down against his back, crushing him closer—there isn't a proper weight to this and she hasn't felt something, really felt something in such a long time.

"Bones…" His mouth curves, warm, against her ear, and he whispers. "I have real blankets, you know."

She laughs a little, allows her eyes to fall closed, unthinking. "I know."

And even still, he turns their bodies until it's him bearing her weight and not the other way around.

Soaking a spot on his shirt without him seeming to notice or care, her face presses close against him, his fingers weaving into her hair with the press of his wet palms, sweaty and tear-stained, to the base of her neck. And…anyone else, if this were anyone else, she would be incredibly embarrassed, ashamed of her lack of control. But it isn't. And she isn't.

Their legs are tangled, his hand running a slow circle over the back of her blouse, and she falls asleep with him like this. Just like this. This is a moment, like Booth had mentioned before. This has to be a moment, she thinks.

One by one her inhibitions seem to melt away, uncoil and propel her toward something she's never even bothered to want. Maybe she needed this, to fall asleep beside him, his arms drawn tight around her as if to mold her body to his. Maybe it's a closeness she desires...would like to desire. But it's the _why_ that bothers her. Why, when she's never needed this before?

Love would seem a simple answer, justified and so straightly aligned with Occam's razor as to be almost scientific, a single syllable that weighs heavy on her tongue. But it means nothing if she's made it contingent upon him remembering her. Because contingencies, stipulations like that, are selfish, unkind. She's learned enough to realize love should be neither of those things.

* * *

It's fluctuating, fickle, the time she now finds herself willing to dedicate to writing about crime or much of anything outside of medico-legal reports, journal articles. Facts she can stand behind. Her publishers are quick to remind her that the economy's fickle and fluctuating, too, and she supposes her writing less than she used to isn't exactly the cherry on top of the cake for them.

_Before_, long before Booth's brain tumor, her publicist and her agent used to joke that Kathy and Andy could never catch a break. Brennan isn't at the mercy of their whims, but she eventually chose to write a scene where her characters have sex in a bedroom—not the back of Andy's car, or Kathy's office, but in a bedroom. And sheets obscured the sight but not the sound of their bodies as he lost his rhythm in her, pressing kisses and words she could hardly make out to the line of her jaw as she pulsed around him, her release so close to hitting her in waves, every nerve rippling with the knowledge that this time, this one time, they'd fall together.

Or something conceptually similar to that.

"Temperance, you're a regular romantic under all that science," her editor began, laughing just a little because it's something they both knew wasn't true. "But your readers enjoy the interplay between two people whose stars always crossed. The world as you write it may be scary as hell, but it's realistic. So, for everything to suddenly turn out happy and neat would be almost self-indulgent, no?"

No.

Yes.

Temperance Brennan, she used to tell herself, doesn't have internal conflict.

Only…she does. She really does.

In fiction, she finds, love is just as fraught, just as impossible, as in reality. And her readers enjoy Kathy and Andy and their back and forth, dancing, never-quite-reality relationship.

(Books, she's been told, tend to tell more about the author than they do about the characters.  
Brennan doesn't believe this, but she can see how some people might.)

* * *

She may have woken atop his body this morning, but she knows they're closer, now, to something more heated than that. She'd call it an argument but it isn't. Bickering, but she believes that requires words.

He's utterly silent, so is she, and that shocks her just a little. Are arguments between partners, between friends, really meant to work in this way?

From his side of the car he watches her neck stretch, that expanse of bare skin twist back and around in an attempt to get out the crick there. Because you're supposed to fall asleep on a pillow which, metaphorical soft spots aside, Booth is not.

_I had forgotten that you snore,_ she'd whispered today as she woke, only to see the corners of his mouth wrinkle in confusion at her words, deserving of an explanation and receiving, instead, a moment of silence from her. Silence that said maybe they'd fallen asleep on that bed in Oklahoma, their breath too overworked and their bodies slick with sweat and still absolutely teeming with a need for one last touch or kiss in the dark. Or maybe she'd awaken in Vegas to his fingers smoothing along the inside of her thigh, his tongue tangling with hers before the sun began to seep in through the blinds. All of this might have allowed her to know that sometimes he snores. All of this never happened.

She shifted against him, fingers scraping unconsciously along his thigh and drawing a quiet groan. She didn't understand the subsequent embarrassment. His or hers.

"What are you doing?"

"I'm sorry, but it's nothing to be ashamed of. It's very common for sexually virile men to wake up arou-"

"You know, you should probably getting going, right Bones? Work in an hour or so."

"But I thought I was always welcome here," she countered, only half serious.

Everything thereafter seems loaded, unnecessarily tense; glances, his unfaltering hand to her back, and words are passed off as entendres, as subtle digs. Last night it'd seemed they'd reached a pinnacle of trust and just as swiftly the mere suggestion of sex seems to splinter that. The accidental and briefest mention of her abandoned plans to have a child threatens to let all of it undone.

He's glowering at her. _Abandoned_ she stresses, and he throws up his hands.

"Booth, the steering wheel."

He hates backseat drivers.

His eyes leave the empty road, meeting her gaze straight on. This is dangerous, and there's nothing safe about the look in his eyes, the squaring of his shoulders that he used to reserve for when he invaded her space, drawing her in and stoking her ire with question after question and comments that stung enough to make her wish he'd do something more useful with his mouth.

She sighs, rolls her eyes, if only to avert her gaze.

"Isn't it funny how it seemed like you were telling me _every single thing_ when really you weren't telling me anything at all? That's gotta be funny to someone, right Bones?"

"I think sarcasm is uncalled for."

"Three months, and you forgot to mention we were going to have a baby," he says, his palms tightening around the wheel, as all the underlying tension and disappointment—in her, she knows—presents itself in his whitening knuckles. They wouldn't have been having a baby _together_, she's explained, and he still doesn't understand that.

"You know, I wouldn't have agreed to have a baby with you if we were anything like this, Bones," he says, and she wonders if he'll ever understand how well they used to work.

"Like what?" she asks, exhausted and yes, sorry, if that's what it takes for this to end.

"I'm different, somehow, to you. More than just my memory. It's-that's what's wrong. If I had tried to take last night farther than it went…what would you have done? Because I'm half convinced you would have gone home, slapped me or…something. Do you not trust me, Bones?"

He all but stops in the middle of this middle of nowhere Virginia road, and he clearly no longer cares enough to be angry; but rather, speaks hotly in her ear, hardly driving. It's his job to do the driving. She slides his hand off and away from the center console.

"I'd always assumed that trust was implicit in our partnership. I don't understand how you could think otherwise, but I think it would perhaps be best for you to focus on driving for the time being, okay?"

"I never would have been okay with that. Letting you raise our child by yourself," he says quietly, with a sidelong glance at her. "Deep down, I think you know that, too. Maybe I cared enough to give you exactly what you wanted all of the time. But really, Bones. _Really._ If you love someone you don't just give them what they want because they ask for it. Especially if it's wrong."

Her eyes avert briefly before she shrugs, furrows her brow in confusion that feels forced. "I never said you loved me."

He's quiet for a minute that seems to pass forever, and she stares very hardly out of her window. She doesn't think his silence has ever hurt her more.

The car turns off the road and rolls to a halt at an empty rest stop. There's a startling pressure to his fingertips as they curve over her shoulder, but she doesn't want his comfort, his warmth, because it changes nothing. She's like him in this way, sensitive to pity, shying away from it in even the smallest amounts. Really, she thinks, what she's wanted, all these years, all the time that she's counted in digs and human remains and papers published, is for someone to take her and make her see that they love her, that _you're wrong, Temperance. All along you've been so, so wrong._ Or maybe it's only him that makes her want this.

"Before…I'm sure…I know that I loved you a lot. You must have known, had some idea. I woke up remembering how I felt and I didn't even know your name."

She chews slowly on her lip, feels it swell in parts.

_Loved._ The word isn't so much a self-evident truth as it is closure to a sliver of their past that she clearly never understood.

There was never a sign, never clues or hints or a barometer of how _someday, I promise you will_ and _everything happens eventually_ and _that's a lot of heart, Bones _were intended. Even the best of intentions fall short at times, they touch upon truth, are enough to keep her satisfied, yet make every day more unnecessarily surprising for her than the one before. He surprises her completely, after all this time.

"I don't make suppositions, Booth."

"I get that we work together, and some things, _some people_ are off limits. Okay, if we agreed to that. But I don't understand why I would encourage you to start a family all by yourself when it would have been my child, too. After Parker, after all that crap with Rebecca…Bones, I would never do that."

"It was what I wanted. Men donate sperm every single day and yours would have been superior, genetically, to that of any other male I know. Scientific progress should be celebrated, and utilized."

She spouts this on autopilot; it's true, reaffirmingly so, and yet she attempts to feign remorse, to work it into her expression, when she observes the hurt look on his face. She sighs, nods past the empty lot. "We should get back on the road."

His hand moves to twist the key in the ignition. But he stops himself, turns to look at her once more as his voice settles quietly in the space between them, plaintive and frank, just careful enough so that she can't differentiate the annoyance from the tenderness there. He covers her hand. "What happened in those five years, Bones? And I need you to tell the truth, all of it, because if I was agreeing to things like that then to me it sounds like I wasn't very good for you at all."

"You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about," she manages, eyes flashing to his in an instant so quick her head begins to spin. "You don't remember. To insinuate that I'm ever anything but honest and upfront with you and then make a statement like that when you don't even know how…"

"Temperance-"

The sound of her name from his lips, hollow, somehow, stirs an instinct to bring her hands up over her ears. And _almost_. She almost does and that seems very childish, very out of order like this conversation that they're having.

"If it were me with the amnesia, Booth…" she says, trailing off because, honestly, that's what this may always come to: him not remembering and how that _feels. _Because it feels like they're being punished. "If it were me, then you wouldn't let me get angry and practically give up. It's as if everyone's accepted that you won't remember. Well, I don't accept that. I don't accept that, Booth. And if you did remember me at all you would know that if one of us was always telling the other everything and nothing at all then it was-"

"Me?" he interrupts, so quiet it unnerves her. "It was me."

She nods slowly, once, and the vigor, the venom, in her voice has already gone.

Promises can be well intentioned, yet ultimately empty. Even his. She doesn't believe there's need for more explanation than that before he grabs lightly for her chin; and she gives him no response so he holds her until she feels his palms smooth over the contours at her cheeks. "I haven't given up, Bones. Know that."

She says nothing, eyes telling her acceptance of this as his body slouches forward across the console, breath brushing her chin, over the fingers that cup her face.

And when his lips press to hers, quickly and without hesitation, he's already too close for her vision not to be clouded. It registers for a moment as unexpected, not what she wants. A mere kiss to avoid more heated words, to quell the unwanted hum of tension and redirect it as messily as things like this can only go. She takes the gesture, the brush of his lips, nevertheless, and leans in with an intensity that startles her, frenetic and he matches, heightens, his mouth full of heat. It floods her, something hot and liquid in its movement, like she wants, because she wants him and tells herself she needs this too—to feel his tongue slip past her teeth, as the elusive memory of the last time, the mistletoe and the brief touch of his tongue, surfaces only to crackle and burn away with the plunge of his fingers into the hair falling loose from her bun.

The seatbelt is buckled still and it digs into her clavicle, rubs her skin red with his mouth moving and tasting dark like coffee or chocolate and every thing she knows she shouldn't have. It's addictive for her in this way. He makes her this way; hungry, incoherent. Her hand clasps loosely into a fist as she raises it from her lap to hold his tie or maybe to his collar. She's reaching for one of the two, some piece of him, and he grabs her wrist before she does, gripping it tightly as he pulls his face away.

For a moment she can only stare.

"What—you thought that I was going to hit you?" she asks, her breath coming in shorter gasps. She let's out a low, affected laugh. "Why would I…why would I want to hit you, Booth?"

Booth looks absolutely speechless, and _good_, she thinks, there needs to be some sense of shame for thinking that she of all people would do that to him. He opens his mouth but she speaks first. "Tell me," she presses.

"Jesus, Bones. Forget about what I said earlier, you're wrong if you think I actually thought that you…I'm sorry if you thought-"

"I don't want you to be sorry I want you to-"

"To what? What do you want me to say?" he asks quietly, voice uneven. He shakes his head. "You know, let's just say what this is really about. What is it you want to hear from me, Bones? That I'm going to remember everything tomorrow, or next week, or by the end of the month? _You_ tell me."

Her gaze tilts up to his, and she begins to feel almost furious, to tell him _no, that's completely off the mark,_ before she realizes she doesn't know what she's been leading him to believe all this time. And maybe he's right, because she'd give almost anything for him to say any one of those things and for it to be true.

Perhaps this is where they're both meant to realize she's incapable of being the least bit objective where he is concerned.

"I want for Sweets' book to not end badly," she says, finally, then kind of laughs as she finishes, though she'd really like to cry, too. There's nothing companionable about the quiet that follows. It's uncomfortable, a little melancholy and too long—that's all.

"I want for us to be good again, Booth."

"Bones, four years you were my partner, isn't that what we are now?"

Her only answer is silence, and she searches for an accurate, adequate response.

"Were we different?" he presses, voice raising and her hands are sinking into the leather of her seat. She doesn't know what's going to happen. "Did I sit here last time and listen to every reason why you think I should sleep with someone else, or why you want to have a baby with me without _really, honest to God_ having a baby with me? Did I tell you there was a line last time, Bones, did that make it better, easier, because you never had to bother to think that _this_, _you and me_ are hell of lot more than whatever it was we were calling ourselves?" The questions tumble from his lips, unrelenting, and she'd like to stop each and every one as they pass because he's right and he's wrong, and labels and names are a necessity in societies structured on a categorical basis, but she's never attempted to define them. To define _this_.

So she kisses him, mostly without thinking, and because there's opportunity to curb his flow of words, right here and now as she sees his face hovering in front of hers again.

She kisses him.

"Don't" she breathes, just before, and wonders if she's speaking to herself or to him. Maybe it doesn't really even matter anymore.

But there's an air of desperation, not indecision, inside this car. She swallows any second thoughts, pulling his face awkwardly between her hands, the seatbelt still sharp against her shoulder as she feels her way across his skin, searching and desperate for anything that might mitigate this sense of failure, of hopelessness. This inability to answer him.

At the onset, there's no response to what her lips are doing, no recognition, and-

"God," he breathes out, mouth tilting away to assault the skin at the base of her neck, his fingers snapping the release on her seatbelt as she climbs over the center console, climbs over him, fingers pressing into the muscle she finds at his arms, the jut of her hip hitting painfully at the steering wheel as her knees slick back against the leather upholstering. _Slow_, she remembers him always saying, that's the way it goes when two people make love. _Slow, slow_ she runs on repeat in her head, back beginning to arch as his hands slide quickly, simply, along the length of her thighs, all but burning. But this isn't the way they are, at the other's disposal, and for a moment she tries _tender_, scraping her nails across the back of his shirt in a sweep that manages only to spell out her impatience.

It's greedy again before she knows, the car silent save the heavy sounds of their breath. She avoids his mouth and his eyes, focusing on the barriers between skin, her fingers fisting around the collar of his shirt as her lips travel the salty sheen along his throat. Brennan smiles when he slides the tie from her upswept hair, a kiss to her temple as he tugs gently, then a little harder as she nips at his lip and he returns the gesture; and she'll let him do this to her everyday if only it will one day allow him to remember the request he made of her on that airplane to China. It's important, every moment was important.

"Bones, tell me what you're thinking," he exhales shakily, pulling away, mouth briefly touching to her own before he makes a second attempt at pausing.

"Just…no thinking, that's what you usually tell me," she says, matter-of-fact and biting slightly at her lip as his forehead pushes against her own. She gives a low, breathless sigh between the part in his lips as his hands move under her dress, rubbing her back, thumbs grazing just below her breasts, and she shivers. "I want you," she says quietly, fingers working on the buttons of his shirt, her palm pressing warmly to his stomach.

His hands are at her wrists now, and, "Me too," he says back between her lips, a little bit of a smile and she's smiling too, suddenly. Finally. He's kissing her everywhere, feeding off of her impatience, and like she hasn't a surface dull enough to pause for. When he's undone the clasps of her dress, the clasp of her bra, his mouth moves hotly over her chest, closing over a nipple, and there's a shallow gasp that she gives against the curve of his ear, the pads of her fingers making uneven pressure points along his spine, the sinews, the bones and the cartilage, and she decides it's romantic in the way that something which has always been there, _always_, could only feel when she first realizes its existence. A part of her is pretending, still, that she doesn't care about the romance. He groans, shifting against her…yes.

"Yes?" he whispers, from above her or beneath her—she can't place the proper prepositions—and his voice is dark and wet between her lips again.

"Yes," she says thickly, a little dazed and a little incoherent and she pauses just to breathe against the new wrinkles in his shirt, _yes_. Her fingers are quick with his belt buckle and his belt, _cocky_, and she feels very settled suddenly against his hips and her fingers are teasing over his cock.

"Bones-" she feels him shiver too, for the first time. She's made him shiver. The thought is ludicrous to her and she wants to pause and wonder why. But that means thought, and she isn't thinking, or rather, her back is arching and she's thinking she wants this, needs this, and she's insatiable but maybe he likes that a little too.

Then something happens. One of them does something wrong, makes a mistake. Her hand is settled over his lap, half stroking him and half not, and his fingertips are at the apex of her thigh and she's becoming complacent, simply melting into him as though it were her particular right, and maybe it is, but he stops. He blinks at her, his face flushed like she's never seen before and his skin is slick. "I'm sorry," he says, apologetic and averting his gaze as he gathers both of her hands in his.

"I-I'm sorry?"

"Bones," he says, holding her hips, and his chest still rising and falling like there's still something heavy against it. He takes a breath. "There are people you just don't things like this with, not even because it's a matter of principle, but because…if you love someone you make love to them. That doesn't happen in the front seat of a car," he finishes, cautiously, and she promptly slips her hands from out of his, slides her body away.

"So this is a mistake," she says, an eyebrow raised, and she feels almost as indifferent as she looks. She's good at altering her state mind in this way, compartmentalizing; it's the easiest manner of misdirecting herself from whatever's gone wrong, and the safest.

"You know that isn't what I'm saying."

"Cam said she would have lab results for us by noon. It's nearly twelve-thirty," she replies, her face contorting with false bemusement and shock, as her fingers press, quizzical, over the buttons on her phone. She should see about the results.

"Hey," he whispers, gently, watching her.

She begins to dial, and he pries her cell away, thumb pressing hardly on the end button and she looks up very angrily at him, eyes cutting because she can't stand him in this moment.

"Jesus Christ, Bones," he says, when she snatches the phone away from his hands. The interior of the car is beginning to cloud before her eyes, she's feeling childish again.

"You know, you say that, Booth, that it has to mean something, that somehow sex is supposed to fulfill both carnal and emotional desires, but did it really matter anyway? I don't understand, if after three months we've come to this, for four years we weren't-"

"You don't need me to understand any of that," he interrupts. "I'm not working off of a timeline, Bones. All I know is that I want the first time we-" he shakes his head, almost shy.

"What?" she asks. Her face has turned in his direction. "You should learn to say it, Booth," she continues tiredly, a little haughty, like always.

He laughs, a little bitterly, perhaps with some confusion. "You know, Bones, you're right, I think it would do you a world of good to stop thinking so much."

"When I don't think, I make mistakes," she says, coolly. Her fingers and wrists feel limp, joints liquid and loose as she supposes they were meant to feel after sex, and with some difficulty she pulls up at the zip that's come undone on her boot, her mind beginning to ache a little bit less at the sight of her clothing intact.

At her back, she feels his hand hover above the undone clasp of her dress, and she pretends not to notice. She doesn't want to see.

"Booth, I would like to get back to the Jeffersonian at a somewhat reasonable time," she murmurs, watching the key sit in the ignition; he turns it and her body jumps a little as she faces firmly away, the dull shape of her cheekbone pressing to the window.

He stares, hand falling onto the headrest behind her. She huffs in annoyance, whispers something she knows she doesn't mean as his white shirt clings, the buttons still undone and his face more smug than ever and…she looks away again. Her throat dries a bit more than before, the words still stuck and all of this feels too private. Her breasts are peaking from just a moment ago and more from the cooling warmth in this car, the quiet groan of the engine, so she crosses her arms slowly against her chest.

Her eyes close. He makes her nervous.

"I'm sorry," Booth breathes, soft and certain in her ear, and she doesn't grace the apology with a response. She isn't the one who stopped.

* * *

To this day, and since the very beginning, her relationship with him has been predicated on a genuine curiosity that's never quite been sated. Of course, there have been days when she wondered whether he really even liked her, whether his constant strives to humor her were insulting or endearing or some impossible mix of the two, or whether her partner was really capable of being the consummate gentleman all of the time. All people lapse, all people make mistakes. He rarely tells her when her provocations have gone too far, and sometimes she wishes that he would. The truth is that she will never understand him.

They twist so easily from teasing to loving to pretending they aren't doing either that it honestly makes her quite sick when she cares to stop and think about it. They're too diametrically opposed and too secretly similar to possibly work.

And yet, somehow she knows that he's good for her. That the things he says and does are meant and felt and that there have always been times she's wanted to love him even if she couldn't.

It works like this:

She takes a bite of her salad, the holier-than-thou look she knows that he loathes breaking clear across her face. He stops her train of thought, says something insightful, crushing, and true.

"Here we are…all of us, basically alone, separate creatures, just circling each other, all searching for that slightest hint of a real connection. Some look in the wrong places, some, they just give up hope because in their mind they're thinking 'oh there's nobody out there for me'. But all of us, we keep trying, over and over again. Why? Because every once in awhile, every once in awhile, two people meet and there's that spark. And yes, Bones, he's handsome and she's beautiful, and maybe that's all they see at first. But making love, making love, that's when two people become one."

Oh.

She gets it. She's learning.

And…none of this is real for her now.

She is more intelligent than he will ever be; that isn't arrogance, it's the truth. The thing is: it _is_ scientifically impossible for two objects to occupy the same space. Now she knows that people can't push themselves together and expect to fit. She's tried.

(_No_…no really, Bones, you haven't tried at all.)


	4. Chapter 4

To this day, and since the very beginning, her relationship with him has been predicated on a genuine curiosity that's never quite been sated. Of course, there have been days when she wondered whether he really even liked her, whether his constant strives to humor her were insulting or endearing or some impossible mix of the two, or whether her partner was really capable of being the consummate gentleman all of the time. All people lapse, all people make mistakes. He rarely tells her when her provocations have gone too far, and sometimes she wishes that he would. The truth is that she will never understand him.

They twist so easily from teasing to loving to pretending they aren't doing either that it honestly makes her quite sick when she cares to stop and think about it. They're too diametrically opposed and too secretly similar to possibly work.

And yet, somehow she knows that he's good for her. That the things he says and does are meant and felt and that there have always been times she's wanted to love him even if she couldn't.

It works like this:

She takes a bite of her salad, the holier-than-thou look she knows that he loathes breaking clear across her face. He stops her train of thought, says something insightful, crushing, and true.

"Here we are…all of us, basically alone, separate creatures, just circling each other, all searching for that slightest hint of a real connection. Some look in the wrong places, some, they just give up hope because in their mind they're thinking 'oh there's nobody out there for me'. But all of us, we keep trying, over and over again. Why? Because every once in awhile, every once in awhile, two people meet and there's that spark. And yes, Bones, he's handsome and she's beautiful, and maybe that's all they see at first. But making love, making love, that's when two people become one."

Oh.

She gets it. She's learning.

And…none of this is real for her now.

She is more intelligent than he will ever be; that isn't arrogance, it's the truth. The thing is: it _is_ scientifically impossible for two objects to occupy the same space. Now she knows that people can't push themselves together and expect to fit. She's tried.

(_No_…no really, Bones, you haven't tried at all.)

* * *

She imagines she gives a letter to him, something significant and quite straightforward, as a means to an end. It's sparsely written and all the more dramatic because of that—on a piece of her stationery, and in her own handwriting. It might begin with _there is a line_ or _there was a line_ or _there should be a line_ and would end with a very serious, _might we still have coffee sometime?_ Everything very proper, neat, and clean. A severe crossing of the lines in her t's and not in her heart.

I _have no desire to go out into the field and would like to reduce the frequency of my assistance in cases._

But Brennan isn't dramatic, and she doesn't believe Booth would accept any of that. He would be angry but unconvinced. She decides to call it a break; a break isn't so bad as a decision to sever all ties. She doesn't want to sever her ties to him.

"Field work has left me significantly less time for personal scientific inquiry and I would like to reduce the frequency of my assistance in cases," she enunciates into his answering machine.

By mistake, she forgets the bit about coffee. She thinks it was the most important part.

Somehow it's all filtered through one of his desk jockeys anyway, all of her words boiled down to a tiny message slip, written upon in Charlie's messy scrawl.

_8:35 am: Dr. Brennan called concerning a request to reduce her involvement in casework. _

The no 'return call requested' box has been checked very neatly and it's amusing to her that the FBI has managed to retain little relics like this, of earlier times. Maybe it's only Booth who gets his messages in this way. He likes standing on precedent, keeping tradition.

"What the hell is this?" she hears at 9:25 am, the message slip dropped onto her keyboard. It slides down the keys and into her lap, as she startles at the voice, not unexpected but Booth doesn't sound loud or belligerent or angry, like she might have expected. No—he doesn't even sound hurt. She hardly hears his voice and her face rises to stare back at him, all shock and innocence. She's had time to think this over; she is the innocent party here.

"I left you a message."

Her lips purse, the heat rising in her neck and in her cheeks. He's smug again—his hands are sitting on her desk.

"Is that really what you want?" he asks.

"It's only a break. Maybe you'll remember more without me," she says quietly. The slip of paper gets moved back over to him, his annoying hands, and she feels slightly like she's breaking something inside of herself. But this is the way that things go. People move in and out of her life, and she never asks for anything permanent. Really, it could be any man standing in front of her now. But it's Booth. It's Booth. "Distance would be useful. For the both of us. I'm not always levelheaded where you are concerned and I worry it may start to seep into our working relationship. I can't remove myself enough to…"

"To what?"

She shakes her head, looking up at him again. She wants to stand. The balance is off when he's looming over her like this.

"Why did you stop?" she asks him, suddenly needing something more than yesterday's explanation.

"What?"

"In the car. Why did you stop?"

"I told you." But he nods, and she fixes her eyes on his face. "Remember how you told me that I said you were special. Well, I've never stopped thinking that, Bones. I don't know why you would think that I had. We're a hell of a lot more than an SUV in some deserted West Virginia backwood."

"Why should it matter? How is a bedroom any more special than a boat, or a plane, or a train?" she says, teasing, though truly she understands.

He blanches a little at the suggestions. "You sound like a Dr. Seuss book."

"I know who that is," she replies, a smile flitting across her face for just a moment. She clears her throat. "I do not like green eggs and ham. I do not like them, Sam-I-am."

He smiles next, his expression almost giddy, and she's becoming more and more enchanted by this notion of the two of them being like this, always. He's entrenched in her life in every possible way; no man will ever live up. It isn't fair.

"You told me what it meant to make love, and, you're right, it was nothing like what happened yesterday. Emotions aren't quantifiable. You should never have attempted to map your thoughts—your feelings—about sex onto mine."

She sounds like their shrink.

His jaw tightens and he leans across her desk. She doesn't pull back. "No. No, you see, I know you want to believe those things too. To feel the exact same things," he says determinedly, and she neither confirms nor rejects the statement. There's a weak sort of nod that comes almost a minute after the fact, prompting his lowering of his face down into her face, his hand sliding over her hand.

"I love you, Bones," he says, his voice raw, and she can hardly look at him.

He tears the slip of message paper in half, dropping it into the garbage can without so much as a glance at her, and she thinks it's just dramatic and meaningful enough to be coming from Booth. There he is, ripping her excuses apart; she warms to the thought that they're here keeping each other honest. With a quick grin, his hand extends over her desk, and she stares a little dazedly at it, the _I love you_ just beginning to sink in. He loves her.

"I'm Special Agent Seeley Booth," he says seriously, and she puts her hand in his, giving a vague sort of shake. "I'm going to be your partner and you're going to do field work with me. Cam was prepared to fire you once. If you want to quit doing your job, I'm sure Clark over there would be a much cheaper hire."

"Cam would never fire me. My name alone garners enough funding to—you're blackmailing me," she says, staring up and she can hardly believe it.

He tilts his head. "Yeah, I am."

"This is the opposite of what I set out to accomplish," she explains.

"Kinda the point, Bones."

She believes the point is this: the Booth she knew and the Booth she knows are the same person. Time and space, and barriers in his brain aside, central things do not change. This is Booth and he loves her. It's all she can think about.

* * *

_You see two people and you think, 'they belong together', but nothing happens._

Is it any fault of their own? People say that _there's a spark_, ask them _are they blind? To so clearly have something right there in front of them…don't they ever wonder? _

Wonder what?

What might have happened had she had carried on with him in his car? What he might have done if years ago she had rolled up onto her toes, pulled his mouth to hers in that firing range?

Of course she wonders.

People have their hearts broken every day, fall in and out with each other and with love, because nothing's sacred, nothing possesses the properties, the endurance, to last forever. With the idea of love comes too much complexity and somehow not enough; there's no explanation beyond allowing every aspect of your future to be dependent upon someone else's, permitting every moment, each pull and swing of another's hips and those three words inevitably mingled among _right there_ and _fuck_ and _harder_ to go to your head.

Which is stupid in so many ways, she thinks, but remarkably human too.

And there's only so long she can close herself off. Because it isn't logical or involuntary at all. No matter how much she likes to tell herself that something snapped when she was fifteen, that she's the way she is today solely due to circumstance.

There's no excuse to justify lying here half awake to herself, to have taken men into her bed unthinking, unfeeling, for so many years. Let them touch her, slide their palms across her shoulders, down the furrows of her spine, as though she would someday warm to words that went beyond the realm of science. As if anything below her surface were ever up for exposition. And where was Booth, she wonders, her partner, whose touch is hot and crackling, the sincerity in it disarming. Whose fingers can chase out the chill, make her chest rise and then fall with more force, less abandon, than anyone she's ever known. She can be cold and aloof, and she's made herself this way for a reason. But when reason no longer stands, when she's no longer just that child who curled into the corners of tiny rooms that were never her own, who studied Descartes and Darwin and Dostoevsky as if they alone would teach her about life, then there's no longer legitimate reason to be the way that she is.

When you're Temperance Brennan you know a great many things. How to measure stature from long bones, the currency for trade among the Aché, and that you can't ask someone to lock their heart in a box and expect them to be okay, _really okay_ at the end of the day. Because it's impossible, like two people becoming one, like two solid beings occupying the same space, and still she's always tried. Like love, and yet not like love at all, cynicism and coldness can run their course, reach a natural conclusion. Burn like a wick at both ends until all that's left in her is the sincerity and misplaced doubt from which they bloomed in the very beginning.

She loves him.

It doesn't leave her giddy, doesn't make her want to speak things from mountains or dissolve into an incandescent puddle like popular culture suggests; it sits inside her, still and patient, hovering in compromise halfway between her head and her heart. Perhaps it's selfish, but she wants to tell no one at all, let it suffuse her with color and warmth as the day becomes a minor blur, as she signs evidence slips, and inventories skeletons to a small chorus of _alright there, Dr. B? _and _sweetie, you're glowing, now spill_, and _10,000 marriages a year result from romances that began during coffee breaks._ And why must everyone be so damn perceptive?

When she retreats to her office the admission is still unspoken, still foreign on her tongue. She comes close to uttering it aloud, rolling it loosely to let it pass from her lips.

Close to noon, there comes a knock at her door, no pause before it opens.

"We've got a body, Bones."

_We_, and she wipes quickly at the corner of her eye.

She comprehends the risk that she takes, the line she's long overstepped.

Because with love there can be no treading carefully, no halfways and maybes. It's all or nothing. It has to be.

In the end, it has to be Booth and Brennan.

("That's my conclusion."  
"And, what, that makes Booth one of your scientific theories?"  
"Yes. Because more than an idea, more than a simple hypothesis, a theory is capable of withstanding all of the rigors of testing and time."  
"Oh, Bren-"  
"And Booth _can_. He has.")

* * *

There's a softness at her back, a chest, and no words. Booth. Her fingers smooth against the front of her lab coat, and she lets herself lean a little into him, but only a little. He's very solid and still, watching her head bow to examine the fragments of bone laid out before them. Only, it's less watching and more like he's touching her with his eyes.

"It's late. I think Mr. Bones there can survive the night without you," he says against her hair, and it comes out muffled so he steps away. She's heard him perfectly though, and gives a low sort of laugh like she knows what's coming next.

"So can you," she says.

"Yeah…you know, I'll be okay. I'm like that guy in Bourne Identity. Women find my confusion irresistible."

"I don't find Ben Affleck or his confusion irresistible at all-"

"I'll just be on my way. You know, save the world or something-"

He chuckles at the sound of their voices layering over one another and she slides her chin against her shoulder, staring back at him. He looks tired and handsome, and she gives him the best smile she knows how, her teething sliding against each other, and it's so natural if she really stops to think about it. The smile is more unconscious than she knows.

"You were Clark Kent for Halloween two years ago." It comes after a long pause and it's awkward; she's fishing, she thinks, for something. She wants to hear that he loves her again, his voice richer this time, not as though the feeling is undesired or particularly painful. She's made things painful for him; she reaches for him behind her, takes his hand, pressing it gently into her own as she smiles in attempt to clear the awkwardness. He's not letting go. She worries her fingertips are greasy still, from the bones.

"That's right…" he trails off. He returns her hand to her, and it slips easily back down to her side. "So…uh, since you haven't actually turned around yet, I'm guessing dinner isn't part of the plan for tonight."

"I can't, I've fallen behind since you…"

"Since I lost my mind," he laughs, pressing a palm to the examination table and giving her a sideways glance. She stares warily at the hand; he removes it.

"Sweets says your joking is a coping mechanism."

"And you believe him?"

"Should I believe him?"

"No."

She sighs, unconvinced.

"It has to hurt, at least somewhat. You know, we read ancient texts like the Popol Vuh or The Analects. Yes, it suffices, and maybe it's enough to capture the intention of a certain people at a certain period in time, but it's not authentic. Confucius didn't write the Analects. Mayans didn't write the Popol Vuh. I didn't experience things the way you did. And ultimately words convey very little. I've never found them more ineffective than I have in the past few months. They remove complexity from situations and events that should mean something."

"What? It's enough," he says, a hand on her shoulder and a gentle squeeze. She thinks about memories—her own—and the last time she can recall his fingers curling around her shoulder like this. Years ago, the sinking feeling she got watching her father drive away, and she wishes there was a history shared and felt between them. Booth is still the best person she knows, and she thinks this now, like she thought it then, while handcuffed to that bench. "It's enough," he presses. "I read the bible I believe you, Bones. Even if the things you tell me are your own interpretations. I will always believe you."

"I don't believe that anything in the bible is true."

"But I do."

She blinks, stopping the tears before they start.

"Bones…"

"I feel like I'm saying goodbye to something." She exhales, looking down at the bones again. They blur before her. "Please don't laugh."

"I'm not going to laugh."

There's a careful movement from him, his hands slipping into her hair and gathering it as it falls into her face. He's good to her in this way, good for her in this way; he's the best at small things. None of his gestures are grand—she loves that about him. He's someone very real to her.

"There's this amazing Greek place on K street. I was eating there the other day and thinking, Bones would love this souvlaki," he whispers, unsteadily, into her ear. She breathes—her shoulders lifting—_really breathes_.

"I don't eat meat."

"I know."

She frowns, biting at her lip. "You are laughing at me," is her measured reply, her back still turned. But there are tears welling in her eyes. A quiet moment passes between them as she places the vertebra that's between her fingers back onto the table; then she turns, her hair whipping against his shoulder. "You know, I am capable of connecting with other people. Not just you. You're not the only one who complements me. There's no such thing as soulmates. I'm a whole person all by myself."

"I know you are."

He nods, very hardly like he's never been so convinced of something—of anything—before. She laughs a little at that, at him lying to her in this way, and it comes as more of a choke. Her palms press over her thighs again, sliding against the lab coat as she looks down.

"I'm sorry. I shouldn't…I'm being mean," she murmurs, his fingers tilting her chin up and into his line of sight. Her palms press to his cheeks, the slight scratchiness there, and she shakes her head a little, thumb settling into the indent behind his nose. She's nervous and it amuses her to realize that he is too, letting her press forward into him first before sliding his fingers back into her hair, his lips capturing hers.

His mouth moves gently against her own, so slow, and she pushes her tongue tentatively in, as her fingers draw away, splaying against his chest, and she's never felt so well-known to another person before. She knows him too. It's Booth and that makes her content, makes her gasp a little into his mouth as his fingers fit themselves along the contour of her waist, over her lab coat. His palms fall onto the stainless steel table and she laughs a little, feeling leisurely and experienced with this, with him, though all of this new. _This_ is against biosafety protocol.

Her lips pull away and she turns, fingers sliding over steel and where his palm-prints remain.

"I still can't go to dinner with you," she states quite clearly as she looks back to her work. Her voice sounds so thick and she feels too thoroughly kissed to possibly focus. She's smiling into her hair.

"We're going to be okay," he says, sounding less breathless than she remembers him being a moment ago. "Do you believe me?" he asks, turning her to face him.

"I trust you," she says, nodding solemnly, then smiling. "And…I believe you."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah."

* * *

On an evening in November a woman leaves a bar. The street is brightly lit, the night crisp and cleansing—she feels more awake, alive to the possibilities of winter, of the little things that come with having family at the holidays. It's easier to adjust to than she thought.

"Even with a coat, you've gotta be freezing," she hears from her left.

Booth. Sitting on a bench, birthday cake in his hands. It's like a punch to the gut.

"No revelations, just share this with me," he says gingerly, staring up at her.

Her legs feel shaky beneath her. She sits. "Was this an implanted memory or…?"

"Shh…" He pushes a forkful of the cake between her lips. The frosting is granular, unbearably sweet in her mouth; it tickles, something rising in her throat and for the first time not sticking.

"I love you," she says clearly. She's sure to look him very closely in the eye; it's something she doesn't want to be ashamed of. "I know you said no revelations…"

"I know," he whispers.

She knows that he could shatter her now if he wanted to. Break her into little pieces, ruin her around the heart. Broken hearts are terribly dramatic, but the truth of the matter is this: she's learning not to worry. More than anything she trusts him, and maybe that's all that will ever matter.

"I would never make a promise to you and not keep it, Bones," he says.

"I know."

Brennan pauses to take a good, quality look at him. She needs to learn to remember things well; she's becoming almost sentimental in that way.

"I would never hurt you," he continues.

"And…I'll try not to hurt you either."

"You don't sound very sure of that, Bones," he says, lips turning lopsided and charming. He's teasing, and yet-

"I am sure. I'm very sure, Booth."

"Okay," he smiles. "Okay."

"Happy birthday." She grins—there's an exclamation point in her smile. Happy birthday! I love you.

"Are you happy?" he asks.

"Not everything revolves around me."

"Well, I'm a planet in your orbit," he says—jokes, really—but still she's amazed she has so much pull. Her fingers splay across his shoulder, a predictable movement—she wants to kiss him senseless. She has forgotten how to be coy.

"I feel however it feels to not be alone. Maybe that's synonymous with loving someone." She pauses, shrugs, and feels her speech begin to speed up, to gloss quickly over where the full stops should be. "I like having someone to speak with. Sometimes I felt very lonely…but then there's you. I like having sex with you. I like knowing you call it making love. I like-"

She's beginning to ramble. Her smile turns almost sheepish and her foot kicks quietly against the sidewalk.

"If you knew, Bones, how careful I want to be with this. With you," he says, a gentle hand to her knee. He tries to feed her more cake. She laughs and turns her face.

"Why?" she asks softly. "Haven't you been careful enough? I'm not just going to change my mind."

His mouth fits against her ear, laying a gentle kiss at her temple before he whispers, eyes mischievous and bright. "Move in with me," he says, serious as hell.

"Now you're trying to scare me."

"It's working."

"No. No, I feel very…attached to you," she stammers out in explanation. She never knew she was capable of stammering, of feeling her cheeks tinge in this way. I am very fond of you, she might as well have said to him. Like a puppy or the museum's Moche ceramics collection.

She takes a solid bite of cake. He takes ahold of her hand, folding it between both of his. The plastic fork clatters down to the sidewalk, haphazard, at her feet. How could someone like her have possibly been caught in this way? A type of smile, a turn of phrase, a line in the forehead, his hands to his hips, her hands there too. These inconsequential things that make her stomach gently turn. He likes to make her this way. To taste the frosting at her lips, from her fingertips, take it into his mouth, his clever tongue smoothing over her rounded nails. Delicious, arousing, beautiful, unbelievable, Bones. If only they weren't in public. What does her skin taste like? It's all so unsavory, so insane. He feels like a coincidence. There are no coincidences; he's always trying to convince her of this. There is free will, but then there is also fate; _things happen because they are meant to happen, bones_. Hundreds of thousands of years gone by, water rising, borders redrawn, small towns and cities, so many stares up at the sun and later the moon, a billion words written and weapons for war, real love and true love and love that is unconditional from all the mothers and fathers of their mothers and fathers. All of it for them to be together in this moment, sitting here with a fork at her feet and her hand in his. The universe has conspired against them.

(It's a bunch of nonsense, of course, but his conviction leaves her a little breathless.)

"Are you happy?" she asks, a finger making a path along the lines in his palm. Suddenly this question is important, she should have thought of it before.

"Yes," he says.

"Good." She pauses to consider. "Me too."

* * *

(_In the end, human beings are capable of withstanding pandemics and wars, progressing from handaxes to wrecking balls and crossing hemispheres on bridges made of ice. There are outright flaws in our design but they don't diminish the uniquely human ability to process the past, to recall it. Maybe there isn't certainty that you'll remember, but rather, hope. It changes nothing, but it's there. It never goes away. _

_And that's okay. We're going to be okay. __  
__We're the center... __  
__We are the center, Bones. We gonna hold? __  
__Yes. Yes, I believe we will._)

* * *

:D Got thoughts, questions, concerns? Was it horribly out of character? Was B&B almost having sex in a semi-public place too tawdry? Lol Who uses the word tawdry anyway? People laugh whenever I say it. Tawdry. Tawdry. Tawdry. Drop me a review! Let me know what you think! Tell me the hiatus has been called off! Who likes baseball anyway? :)


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